Shopify acquires Tailwind • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#11

Post by 219283751 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves!

Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed.

We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#12

Post by weird-eye-issue » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

LoganDark wrote: post #3

Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.

Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#13

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#14

Post by lekevicius » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #8

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#15

Post by pil0u » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

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!

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#16

Post by lekevicius » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #10

simonw wrote: post #6

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.…

I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents. In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.

That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#17

Post by CodingJeebus » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #6

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.…

I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#18

Post by codegeek » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#19

Post by elicash » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #6

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.…

I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.

But I guess not.

Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#20

Post by weird-eye-issue » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

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