alt Hacker NewsVery 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.
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I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
I think think tailwind ui was one of the better purchases I’ve made (web tech wise). Up there with the lifetime acf pro license.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.
As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
> 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.
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business
Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.