Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify (tailwindcss.com)

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.

Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.

Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.

I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.

I have nothing against Tailwind, but I think a company with $5 billion in cash reserves and the general context of Shopify may buy a company like Tailwind for community goodwill, to stabilize the technology that they use for their own business model, to acqui-hire the principals, and various other reasons other than Tailwind's business model.

> 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've done several Tailwind projects and rarely did models from various providers need to reference Tailwind documentation.

I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.

They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.

The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model.

Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.

Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history.

That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.

What does this even mean?

There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier

Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be.

AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.

Yeah, that's why most businesses form.

There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.

My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.

Ready-made UI components and templates have been million-dollar businesses for a lot of companies for a long, long time.

Finding space in a development ecosystem to provide a set of purpose-built tools is a common and healthy software business pattern.

Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.

By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.

The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.

Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)

Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.

To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?

People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.

Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.

You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.

But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering?

Why shouldn't that exist?

The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.

Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself.

> 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.

I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there.

They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.

Neither creating a VSCode wrapper and putting an LLM with tools and valued billion dollars (cursor). But thats the demand and supply.. As long as AI was not there Tailwind would have continued it success journey - until a new tiny(at least initially)/shiny/minimal framework comes along

Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.

Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.

If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.

Much like saying, "there's never a need for Scratch, it's just a way for my kids to code fun things without worrying about semicolons."

Try using Tailwind with server-side rendered frameworks like Rails or vanilla HTML, and you will find yourself repeating the same stuff over and over again. Basically anytime you want e.g. a <button>, you have to repeat all the inline css for it. (There are plugins for Rails that adds "components", but I found it very clunky)

You could still develop frontend in the old way. Most browsers are very good at supporting old websites. But on one wants that.

Yes it makes it insanely easy to refactor duplicated logic into shared and tested modules. Why would you go the other way?

    grid dup 1.0 scale wind-x drop cols-4

CSS modules are also a solution to the above, but, once you get rid of cascading, and you have one stylesheet per component, it is again unnecessary to have the one stylesheet in a different file from the one component. There's no benefit to splitting a component and its styles into two files; it just makes it more annoying to edit. So we move the styles essentially inline, with either Tailwind or CSS-in-JS.

What problems specifically do you see with server-side rendering?

I recently had to help out on a vibe coded project that inherited Tailwind (I think from Figma). It was a short assignment so I didn't dig that deep, but I don't understand the value prop of Tailwind. There was no obvious improvement over what I've been used to; in fact, it seemed a lot messier.

Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this

A bold claim

What exact outcome would correctly align with "good leadership" in your view? It sounds like you think the CEO/cofounder should have "gone down with the ship" here -- how does that help anyone if it means the entire company would have failed?

(I still read and review code)