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Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

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Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#221

Post by sonofhans »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #220
tpmoney wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k i…

The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.

If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#222

Post by exceptione »

sonofhans wrote: post #221
AlecSchueler wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.

If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.

Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs.

As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#223

Post by sixhobbits »

bodge5000 wrote: post #160

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, w…

I'm more of a backend guy but afaik most popular backend frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel etc have 10+ years of top-level work and run on much smaller annual budgets.

Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#224

Post by reassess_blind »

exceptione wrote: post #222
sonofhans wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.

Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs. As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.

It is. That’s why Tailwind had to lay off 75% of their staff.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#225

Post by FooBarWidget »

jeremyjh wrote: post #194
bodge5000 wrote: post #160

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, w…

I could dig and fill in holes in my backyard for 8 years but that doesn't mean I created value or justified the time spent. The library has been good enough for widespread adoption since like 2020 at the latest - did it really need a team of 9 people working on it the last six years? What is there to show for that?

If there is no value in newer Tailwind versions, then why would anybody upgrade past 1.0? Clearly there is value that you don't recognize.

I mean, I'm not a Tailwind user so I don't either. But it's incredibly easy to take open source value for granted. That's why so many maintainers burn out.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#226

Post by FooBarWidget »

Ameo wrote: post #115

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 platfo…

Ok but the original Github issue involved a community contributor complaining that the core devs have no bandwidth to review/accept PRs. If it's not a business, then the core devs have to rely on spare time, which is scarcer than paid-by-business time. You can't have it both ways. If it's not a business, PRs being left to rot becomes the norm.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#227

Post by [deleted] »

sixhobbits wrote: post #223
bodge5000 wrote: post #160

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, w…

I'm more of a backend guy but afaik most popular backend frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel etc have 10+ years of top-level work and run on much smaller annual budgets. Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.

[deleted]

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#229

Post by Culonavirus »

redox99 wrote: post #135

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…

> How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?

Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#230

Post by gt0 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #104
mdasen wrote: post #14

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 spons…

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

I thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.
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