> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.
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. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
There is some slight irony in these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution.
AI just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website. If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.
Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS product, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support and offering a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic, things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.
But I guess not.
Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?
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...
I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.
Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.
I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.
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.
I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents.
In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.
While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.
I wonder whether Tailwind would offer a first-party AI/docs integration if driving traffic to the website is not part of the equation. Something like an MCP server for the docs like what Astro, Microsoft docs, and others are offering.
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.
I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!
I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX.
Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.
Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.
(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.
To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.
Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.
I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model
As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning.
It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse.
I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.
> 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.
> 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.
You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in.
They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.
I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves!
Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.
We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.
Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product.
Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed.
Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position.
Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.
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. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.
Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
Dumb post.
Many firms exist because of market inefficiencies and then serve to make the market more inefficient to benefit themselves.
This is capitalism for you.
There is some slight irony in these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution.
AI just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website. If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.
Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS product, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support and offering a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic, things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.
I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.
But I guess not.
Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
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.
Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?
[delayed]
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...
I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.
Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.
I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.
Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.
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.
I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents.
In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.
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 people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
That's ok. Teams who pay can use the new versions.
And the AIs they use would have no inherent training on those new versions.
While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.
If you release new versions without documentation it's easy for agents to generate that missing documentation.
I wonder whether Tailwind would offer a first-party AI/docs integration if driving traffic to the website is not part of the equation. Something like an MCP server for the docs like what Astro, Microsoft docs, and others are offering.
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
there's never a need to reach for tailwind, it's just a pathology some people like because someone else did the design work for them
They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind.
I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!
IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?
More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat.
I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good.
Bring back the series!
https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger
I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX.
Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.
Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though.
Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3
Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.
Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.
(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.
To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
How well is Laravel doing nowadays?
Pretty well https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46
Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit.
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.
Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co.
It is an age of consolidation.
Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.
I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model
I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues
Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us.
But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.
Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing.
Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years
Phew was worried it was tailscale
As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning.
It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse.
I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.
What are you switching to?
The most pertinent part for many:
> 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.
> 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.
You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in.
They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.
Tailwind Labs != Tailwind
In case it wasn’t clear
Well I guess that's good?
I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves!
Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.
We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.
Happy for Adam and his team.
Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.
Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.
Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product.
Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed.
Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position.
(Edited to fix "Spotify" typos...)
For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables.
meh fuck shopify
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.
And even then, how would Tailwind "die"?