Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

https://xcancel.com/OfficialLoganK/status/200933926325156690...

This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.

It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.

And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.

Last year they claimed they had $800k in ARR from sponsors alone[1]. Add to that whatever they made by selling Tailwind Plus ($299 individual / $979 teams one time payment)

How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).

I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.

I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.

And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.

[1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/

Vercel is also now sponsoring Tailwind CSS: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2009336725043335338

There are a lot of comments to the tune of "why does a CSS library need 1m+ (or any money at all) to survive?". I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but Tailwind 0.1.0 first released on November 2017. Since then, there's been continual improvements up until last month with 4.1.18, totalling 8 years of dev work. A simple CSS library wouldn't have much need to go past 0.1.0, certainly not 1.0.0. Clearly tailwind did, which would imply there's more than meets the eye.

But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.

This is probably related to this [1] if anyone is wondering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950

For every Tailwind, there will be 1000x other projects affected by AI's use of OSS that will not get sponsored.

I suppose this an attempt to try and head off the stories about "AI" killing open source

How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS library have employees?

Will this change the situation of the 75% of engineers who just got laid off, or is this just to fund the framework, rather than the Tailwind Plus team?

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commits/main...

They've just added 26 sponsor companies in the last two days, 7 of them partners!

Kudos to the high velocity action. Given it has to at least go through decision makers, finance and legal, I bet they made the decision almost immediately.

Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?

This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when the tools are chosen.

Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.

I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol

This should be standard industry practice. Any company above a certain size should contribute financially to all software it depends on.

Google (and Vercel) are great for doing this! I would like to see Anthropic and OpenAI do something similar, since they too greatly benefit from Tailwind CSS.

My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that it grew to be.

I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).

It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.

Here's an important quote from the doc:

"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"

It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.

To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.

But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.

If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.

Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.

Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.

[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

On one hand, this is great as Tailwind can continue as a going concern. On the other, how long until Tailwind AI?

Great, so this terror framework keeps existing and I keep pulling my hairs when I want to userstyle unusable sites using it.

If one of the most widely used UI libraries in the world cannot sustain a small team of developers, why would anybody attempt to start a company around an open source library? Does not speak well of the open source business model. At least for software libraries.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Loveable, Figma and others meaningfully sponsoring Tailwind seems like a no-brainer. They want it to thrive because it makes their generated code much better.

It is probably cheaper than update the models to use something else instead of tailwind

I love to see Google & Vercel start sponsoring Tailwind. But the larger question is why did it take the company laying off 75% of their staff for these major tech companies to realize they needed to sponsor? What processes are they doing to evaluate other things to sponsor before AI kills it?

too little too late, the open source is already littered with corpses of starved developers.

unless there's companies like google actively going out of their way supporting open source projects, this is just optics.

Damn that was fast. Github comments flamewar delivers.

Perhaps an acquisition is in the works, and the happenings from yesterday were part of/the start of it?

https://hn-discussions.top/google-ai-tailwind-sponsorship/

I love tailwind, but I think it’s disingenuous for Adam to claim that “AI” killed the tailwind UI kit business.

Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.

Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.

If we can get to just AI reading websites, we don't even need stylesheets!

They should sponsor all OSS libraries they use not just tailwind for cheap marketing

Look, Google is getting recognized as a leadership role in AI space, as it is a leader and Tailwind gets more time to figure things out. Doing a Firefox would not be good, just to coast and spend money on random projects.

It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to make things happen.

Stockholm syndrome

Trump with greenland, and then obsession with tailwindcss. World needs a shakeup :D.

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Ironic that you are posting a site that does exactly what Tailwind is complaining about lol

[flagged]

Where and whom can I email my complain about AI affecting my livelyhood so they sponsor me as well?

I hope things work out for Tailwind. I think it is very decent of Google to do this. Obviously Google takes some heat for their business model but when I was invited to work at Google in 2013 I thought the company had a definite vibe of trying to do the right thing in several dimensions (e.g., renewable energy for data centers).

Doesn't matter to me, as I stopped using Google AI a few months ago because of their lack of respect for my time when creating a freaking API...