How does Tailwind make money?
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
241–250 of 893 posts
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should learn to vote for UBI?
Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of while still maintaining markets in some part of the economy...that is, if you care about the human condition at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill battle.
be real it's just going to be slavery and murder of anyone who disagrees
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#243Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI. Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX c…
(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library. If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.
I should’ve clarified. My apps are all open source so it didn’t feel right putting their UI for free out there. It does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to design components myself.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#244Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…
Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should learn to vote for UBI?
Everyone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin. Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."
Indeed we need to revolt against AI and force every other big powerful nation to do the same thing. Yet unfortunately that seems like a big joke until AI has destroyed their society too.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#246Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#247Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?
For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though a bit ago to be able to point to[1].
For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguments for... somebody wanting to get paid for their work? What are you doing?
Normally you ask for payment upfront, not years after.
Who got asked to pay years after...? After what?
Best read: You are confusing different products. Somebody can do two things and get paid for only one of them.
Worst read: You are really trying to confuse them.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#249I was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#250I wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.