Comment by mdasen
2 days ago
This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.
It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.
Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
[1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.
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The answer really is that they were spending an amount of that money on devs who were working on tailwindUI / Plus - their paid product.
Sponsorships are a supplemental income stream, though, right? They have paid services in addition as I understand it. So covering several full time developers seems pretty good sponsorship wise, when the maintenance should be fairly simple at this point given the maturity of the offering and the tech stack. It’s not like they have to keep up with security vulnerabilities or a mobile version update churn.
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They were posting a job for $250k last year.
Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before.
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
> 3 motivated developers and a designer
Curious how much cash folks think it takes to cover this headcount. I have a feeling people are wildly underestimating the cost of a team this size.
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> That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient
That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.
That's how bloat happens.
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One could compare the main branch against its state from one year ago to find out if the core product justifies this scale. I would say that, more likely than not, it isn't.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
TIL they use Bun:
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a...
Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.
What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support?
That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
FAANG isn't the world.
Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.
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There are plenty of software firms out there (including the one I work for) whose entire budget is less than $1MM, and who have a headcount of developers that's more than 2.
Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.
Blender pays their developers ~ $3M/year. [0]
I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.
[0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.
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Or like 10 senior engineers in mid sized companies in Europe.
I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.
One million a year would easily buy you 10 experienced full-time engineers in most of Europe.
Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
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Huh, FAANG salary comes at FAANG level revenue / profitability generated. That salary is not some kind of human right.
That's barely two low level faang engineers after full load.
Tailwind is not a FAANG, they are glorified frontend CSS devs
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Failwind? Alewind? Nailwind? Galewind?
I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.
CSS the standard is still getting updated, browsers are still updating and making their own slightly different interpretations of the standard, so a CSS library can't be "complete" except for a moment in time.
We are probably in a situation like the one of Firefox or wikipedia.
A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.
Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.
As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
I thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.
money from sponsorships AND money from the PRO version. must be nice
I'd imagine that infrastructure costs are rather significant for Tailwind, and that there are non-neglibible organizational costs as well.
Every app that uses tailwind builds a custom CSS bundle. Tailwind Labs does not host those; whoever is making the app has to figure out their own hosting. So I’m not seeing the significant infrastructure costs?
Even if Tailwind were a shared hosted system like the common bootstrap CDNs of old… CDNs are dirt cheap for a small text file, even if it were loaded billions of times a month.
Some back of the napkin math suggests that it would cost about $300 per billion downloads for the current bootstrap.min.css file (gzip compressed, naturally) at North American network prices on one CDN I’ve used before. Or just $150 per billion globally if you're willing to use fewer PoPs. With browser caching, even split per domain, a billion downloads covers a very large number of users for a very large number of page loads.
infrastructure costs are already covered
> Vercel sponsors all of our hosting for all of our sites (which is expensive with our traffic!) for free and has for years
https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468
100% agree. If an open source project needs money to run, then isn't that defeating the purpose of being open source? Open source is a gift economy. If the owner can monetise it on the side then that is just a bonus.
Why should the license model of the source code prevent developers from making a living? Why should companies which release their software under proprietary licenses also be the only ones able to profit from it?
As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.
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Yes, open source career dev here, pls subscribe to my onlyFans
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Open Source never was "a gift economy".
It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.
If the description for each tier is correct then it seems like Google AI Studio is an Ambassador only ($2,500 per month). This tier includes your company logo on the homepage. The Partner tier ($5,000 per month) includes placing your logo at the top of the sponsor list and Google AI Studio is at the end of the sponsor list.
Edit
Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier.
1. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98b...
...which is not even a developer's salary. Pathetic from a company that makes billions and has surpassed even Apple in terms of market cap (yes, I know market cap means very little, especially in a bubble, but still...)
As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.
Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
All we know is the lower bound. Google donates >= $5,000 a month.
It seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS afloat.
Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down
Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead.
The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
I really don’t understand this idea that seems to be prevalent to let the LLM generate everything from scratch instead of using existing battle tested frameworks. Be it for css or backend code.
Good modular design of software and separation of concern are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will remain smaller, reducing the context for both llm and human.
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I’ve had zero problems getting Claude to generate CSS.
I generally ask for the following, from scratch for each project:
- A theme file full of variables (if you squint this actually looks a bit like Tailwind)
- A file containing global styles, mostly semantic, rather than just piles of classes
- Specific, per component styles (I often use Svelte so this is easy as they live in the component files and are automatically scoped to the component)
IMO there’s even less need for Tailwind with AI than there was before.
When I see people talking about how good AI is with Tailwind it just feels like they’re lazily copying each other without even trying to avoid unnecessary complexity.
I'm not a fan of Tailwind, but I can see that it's probably reasonable for code gen to be able to write / extend projects that use Tailwind, since it's in pretty widespread use. For a new project, maybe it could ask if you want to use Tailwind or just keep things vanilla?
Tailwind is almost too simple to bother using an LLM for. There’s no reason to introduce high-level abstractions (your “real” CSS, I imagine) that make the code more complicated, unless you have some clever methodology.
AI is great at any styling solution via system prompt + established patterns in codebase. Tailwind is just slightly more convenient since it's consistent and very popular.
Totally agree with this, and I think it's what will likely happen. IMO Tailwind got to the point where you are adding dozens of classes to the tag and it gets a little unwieldy. There are some options to get around it but if AI just does't need it it's even better.
There's nothing stopping you from requesting the AI write bare CSS. They're pretty decent at that too. And feed back screencaps, ask it to fix anything that's wrong, and five iterations later you have what you want. Just like a developer.
Bonus point: It'll appreciate one of those "CSS is awesome" mugs, too.
I don't really like Tailwind, but it's a really good fit for LLM tools because there's basically no context needed like you get with normal CSS inheritance, etc. What you see is what you get.
The thing is LLM generate token by token and if you have to write entire css before writing the html, the quality could be worse.
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The problem is training data. How many modern web sites use raw CSS?
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Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design mistake and it shows even more in this particular case.
With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.
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I'm not really seeing or buying this connection. LLMs are capable of generating CSS which is untethered to finances. If tailwind went away it would be in Gemini's interest to not generate it.
another guess could be "gemini tends to write code using tailwind css, so if it goes down, gemini will be writing a lot of out of date code"
I think that keeping tailwind alive means that Gemini Studio:
* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.
The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.
For others, the page where this info comes from is https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
Thanks. If I understand correctly, Google AI Studio is listed as a Partner, which means they provide (at least) 60000$/year.
The lesson here is to always offer a larger tier than what your largest subscribers have.
Yes, you should always have a "batshit insane" tier as someone, somewhere, has enough that it appears cheap.
This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
Not $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0. Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other smaller sponsors as well.
Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
A huge win, especially because now he can pocket that money and doesn't have to spend it on any of the engineers that he just fired.
I would think Tailwind could keep 3 engineers around if they are getting sponsorship of over $1m/yr.
I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... to see what the full picture was.
Remaining:
- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)
- Steve (owner/design lead)
- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
- Robin (engineer)
There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
Not necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last. There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that makes sense.
[0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
What costs could tailwind the OSS project have besides payroll and SaaS subs of max 20% the payroll?
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Obviously, yes. Even in the SV area. We all know engineers' capabilities triple or more if they work from there. /S
>Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty
Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
It clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month, meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.