alt Hacker NewsTailwind Labs is joining Shopify
Comments
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?
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 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!
With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.
The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.
Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.
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.
Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!).
Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.
Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.
Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.
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.)
Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations
I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS.
I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.
I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI.
Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them
The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.
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.
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 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.
I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.
Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.
Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
It is an age of consolidation.
Where we are going, we won't need css.
This was definitely an acqui-hire. I'm glad Adam could find an exit like this.
> Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack
This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.
Actually a good price for it i think, i prefer the design to the tipped ones tbh.
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.
IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?
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.
When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.
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.
I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues
Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.
Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company.
I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.
God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify.
Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.
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.
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.
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.
Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote?
Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit.
That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
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.
I knew this would happen.
Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years
It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI
Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering?
Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.
I remember the time when I did not need any fancy frameworks, webfonts, tons of JS and effin cdns to present my thoughts to the world.
This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.
Tailwind Labs != Tailwind
In case it wasn’t clear
Off topic but. I never liked how tailwind looks but that font. Inter Variable. That is a new level of garbage.
Well I guess that's good?
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.