Comment by ricardobeat
1 day ago
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.
The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for"
The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.
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If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.
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Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer.
It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.
This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
You have one developer. He gets hit by a bus. Now you are fucked.
Having at least several people in critical role helps protect against busses.
I am wondering why are there three owners for a commercial CSS library?
They don't only make TailwindCSS. They also make a large collection of components and templates at https://tailwindcss.com/plus
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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.
They just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee.
> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.
https://tailwindcss.com/plus
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.
At 100k per person per month it's 400k per month (the actual cost is higher. 100k in salary is easily 150k with all the taxes included).
Times that by 12...
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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.
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.
I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.
They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k
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> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers
As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.
$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.
I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?
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100k per month per person is over 1 million a year.
So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.
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Most “senior devs” are actually bad.
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.
According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...
Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.
Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.
All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].
You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.
That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.
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.
Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.
Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.
And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels
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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
Running one of the world’s leading UI libraries is far more impactful than anything 99% of FAANG engineers have or will ever work on.
Tailwind requires a compiler to work.
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.
Interesting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.
Yes, open source career dev here, pls subscribe to my onlyFans
If you are entertaining enough, and could livestream coding while at least topless, I think you could make some pretty buck.
Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.
Open Source never was "a gift economy".
It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.