Comment by simonw

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better.

I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.

They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering?

Why shouldn't that exist?

The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.

Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself.

> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.

I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there.

They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.

Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names!

Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history.

That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.

It sounds like your criticism is about their product, not about their business model.

The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model.

Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.

Most of my clients over the years have been very successful businesses in industries and niches that I never imagined could support a multi-million dollar enterprise. A lot of the time I was surprised that the entire business model was even a thing.

My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.

> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency

Yeah, that's why most businesses form.

This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.

You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.

To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?

I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.

Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed.

There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.

I think many of the purchases of Tailwind UI were basically donations with extra steps. Many, myself included, wanted to support their work. The prebuilt components were nice, but you can find open source components and/or commercial ones on places like ThemeForest for about $20.

>Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Neither creating a VSCode wrapper and putting an LLM with tools and valued billion dollars (cursor). But thats the demand and supply.. As long as AI was not there Tailwind would have continued it success journey - until a new tiny(at least initially)/shiny/minimal framework comes along

> I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist.

It doesn't anymore. There are tens of thousands of businesses that have only been able to exist for a short time due to gaps in the market and technology. Video rental, started with video tapes, died with DVDs and didn't really make it into the bluray era. Owning DVDs came down to $20, no reason to drive across town and rent one for $6. But then Redbox was able to slip into that gap, putting lots of discs in a vending machine, those are cheap and they went everywhere! It was a buck a night! But then streaming killed that DEAD. Had tapes been cheap from the get go Blockbuster never would have existed, but studios decided to ignore that revenue for ages.

I don't see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO.

Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.

According to this logic most businesses should not exists because things should work properly.

I agree. things like tailwind etc should come out as by-products of products making money.

react was not facebook's product. rails was not 37signal's product. Kubernetes was not google's product.

blaming AI is not facing the reality of how tech products / open source is financed in our industry.

It's not really a moral argument that there shouldn't be a business model but more an opinion that you might now consider verified as a correct one that the business model just wasn't there. I agree that there probably never was one.

Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be.

AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.

> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components.

No, it wasn't. It's a CSS utility library. I've been writing CSS for 15 years. I didn't choose Tailwind because I couldn't come to terms with CSS or native components.

strongly agree except that "million-dollar business" is such a low bar these days that I might argue a larger number is needed for the point to stand.

People are reacting foolishly to the word shouldn't here. It's not a "moral" shouldn't; it doesn't meant anything like "shame on them for existing". It's a technical criticism: the only reason this business was ever viable is that the rest of the ecosystem is in such a sorry state that it became worth spending money on this thing that should have been trivial.

A similar claim would be: Jquery shouldn't have existed, because browsers could have done a not-terrible job in the first place to the point that its existence was necessary. They didn't, so it did exist, but it shouldn't have had to.

Telerik has been around awhile and makes $60 million a year and their business model is selling essentially UI components at the heart of it for Microsoft UI frameworks. There is also SyncFusion and DevExpress.

Its crazy, but there is clearly money to be had in this.

I disagree.

Ready-made UI components and templates have been million-dollar businesses for a lot of companies for a long, long time.

Finding space in a development ecosystem to provide a set of purpose-built tools is a common and healthy software business pattern.

They made money by selling components. It was never a good business model. Im fine with saying AI killed it — its not a bad look for AI.

Maybe you're overthinking this?

Tailwind saved me time and the pain of writing CSS so I paid for it.

It shouldn't exist bc it addresses a massive inefficiency? What do you think markets are for

Nah.

Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.

By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.

The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.

Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)

I come to similar conclusions when scanning dev newsletters and I fail to skip over an ad link. Based on the value proposition presented in the one-liner I wonder they exist then wonder whether I really understand "tech industry" as it currently is ...

Finding a massive inefficiency and then finding a way to solve it and make money doing it is basically how the entire economy works.

> the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS

What does this even mean?

There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier

Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries.

People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.

I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.

This sort of critique could be made about almost any industry or individual business. The whole premise of almost any industry is lubricating some friction between the idealized and the reality.

Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.

[flagged]

> and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them)

I have nothing against Tailwind, but I think a company with $5 billion in cash reserves and the general context of Shopify may buy a company like Tailwind for community goodwill, to stabilize the technology that they use for their own business model, to acqui-hire the principals, and various other reasons other than Tailwind's business model.

> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.

What AI replaces isn't Tailwind (AI will reach for Tailwind pretty readily), but the paid ecosystem that was Tailwind's business model. The value of having a pre-built component goes down when building that component is a 10 minute job of an agent.

> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything

I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.

I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember.

Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.

They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue.

I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud.

They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.

What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats.

Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.

If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.

Tailwind is so pervasive it's 100% in pretraining _and_ RLHF.

I've done several Tailwind projects and rarely did models from various providers need to reference Tailwind documentation.

A crawler visiting your docs won't help a human decide to pay for your commercial service advertised on those docs.

And also the fact that agents are solving anubis level 5 challenges Tailwind would not be able to figure out how much traffic is from people vs bots. So that would mean the traffic should be up...

They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades. Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there.

Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.

That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.

If you release new versions without documentation it's easy for agents to generate that missing documentation.