alt Hacker NewsCreators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
Comments
> 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.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> [...] 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. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...]
> 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.
Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market.
There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.
Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.
When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?
Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.
I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?
I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.
I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?
Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a 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.
So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.
> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."
It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother.
I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.
Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.
What about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize?
For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.
If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.
I’ll be honest.
I’m a contributor to this.
I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.
My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind
But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.
So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.
I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.
Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.
Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.
Adam goes into depth on this in an episode of his podcast: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?
I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.
Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.
When I started working on one of my side projects a year or so ago, I realized I didn't have time to figure out how to style each and every component, so I paid for Tailwind Plus. It was pricey, and I definitely had to think about it for a few days, but I'm so glad I did. It saved me way more time than the dollar value of the product, and it has continued to get better.
If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it.
Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI.
Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.
Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way.
They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free.
Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terraform, elastic).
I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it recommends a project.
It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
You can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
This GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and no support to the devs.
The company I work for is going through the same. It is not a product for dev though. We ceased support for many countries now because people see no reason for paying, but after it was gone they said they would pay. If you wait too much for supporting good folks those projects will be gone and only greedy corps will exist
A really interesting moment:
- The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up.
- Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)?
- They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established.
- And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long?
I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?"
However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..).
Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)."
"Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)."
(Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)
although I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library he made to be used by TailwindCSS (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist.
Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.
I recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository: https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56
I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage.
PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job.
PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.
They have a right to decide what their product is. Just because someone sent a PR doesn't mean they have to consider it whatsoever!
Only an anecdote, but I was working on a side project with another dev who wanted to use Tailwind Plus components. It wasn't immediately obvious whether this was allowed under his personal license or if we'd have to get a team license instead, though.
We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license page now, I'm still not sure.
They were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either.
They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.
Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.
>making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?
It's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much more popular.
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
> 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.
Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.
Especially as
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
and
> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
ie. data is lacking.
This is miserable all 'round. I don't know Adam from, well, Adam, but he seems a decent skin in the podcast. Nor, do I know much about Tailwind. However, I do feel for him, and his team, and his ex-team. Just miserable all 'round.
It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling.
@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?
Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.
Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.
Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?
If the business model had evolved together with artificial intelligence, we wouldn’t be talking about a 75% layoff today we might be talking about a 75% hiring spree instead.
Didn't he (half) jokingly ask Anthropic to buy Tailwind a few weeks ago, right when Bun was acquired? Makes a lot more sense now.
I bought Tailwind UI/Plus just for my side projects several years ago because it was so useful. I'm very sad to see this.
My surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering team based in a css framework that basically was used for people that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
Quoting Adam,
> And making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable.
> 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.
NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch.
Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses.
Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated.
Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?
We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it.
Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
If your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with
I've seen that the team had 4 members. 3 being laid off.
I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model.
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now).
Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.