Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS • Hacker News Board

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#311

Post by tpmoney » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

apublicfrog wrote: post #310

rapatel0 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit is the life blood of a business. It’s what pays for, mistakes, new ideas, responding to changes in the market. It tells you your are doing good things and that you are doing them well It’s the engineering tolerance that allows a company to operate and remain reliable. It’s amazing to me that engineers don’t understand this concept. (Clarification, not talking about excess profits)

I think you've missed my point. Most of the libraries I'm talking about are not part of a business. And they didn't need anything to pay for mistakes, new ideas, etc. I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?

> I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?

Because people like to eat and have homes and not everyone wants to work full time on someone else's code and then come home and work full time on their own. Because paying people for the work that they do is a good thing.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#312

Post by filoleg » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

omnimus wrote: post #255

d1sxeyes wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k/mo is off by an order of magnitude. I’m sure some lucky people are raking in 1.2M p.a., but doubt the tailwind devs were.

Kudos to them afaik they were trying to pay their people well. I think they were paying more than 100k/year. I remember they had open position for double that.

Sure, but even 200k/year is an order of magnitude less than 1.2mil/year (which is what the great-grandparent comment claimed, given their 100k/mo estimate).

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#313

Post by andruby » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

AlecSchueler wrote: post #245

andruby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for" The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model? Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.

So the millions of dollars are going towards marketing and suchlike you mean?

I don't understand. Does Tailwind spend money on marketing? Afaik they mostly spend on salaries and probably a bit on hosting/infra.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#314

Post by solarkraft » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

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…

How much more do you need to maintain a few CSS classes?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#315

Post by solarkraft » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

tpmoney wrote: post #199

ricardobeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

That’s an incredible amount of labor. What were they spending it on?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#316

Post by solarkraft » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #210

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? If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop. And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar…

If Tailwind dies, the CSS classes stay the same. What maintenance do they need that can’t be folded into another project?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#317

Post by DoesntMatter22 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #271

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?

People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.

This would also be true if someone wrote a book about Tailwind. Are they “stealing” clicks the too?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#318

Post by apublicfrog » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

tpmoney wrote: post #311

apublicfrog wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed my point. Most of the libraries I'm talking about are not part of a business. And they didn't need anything to pay for mistakes, new ideas, etc. I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?

> I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company? Because people like to eat and have homes and not everyone wants to work full time on someone else's code and then come home and work full time on their own. Because paying people for the work that they do is a good thing.

I think this is a very capitalistic lens you're viewing through. Open source projects (and the web in general) are traditionally not paid work or often seen as "work" at all. The web was built by people who just wanted to do a cool thing, and motivation of profit was much less common.

I challenge the concept of "paying people for the work that they do is a good thing", at least in this context. I don't think everything needs to be profitable and paid, people can just make cool things for love and passion.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#319

Post by jrjeksjd8d » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #317

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.

This would also be true if someone wrote a book about Tailwind. Are they “stealing” clicks the too?

The answer is "it depends". If someone printed out the documentation and bound it together to sell without permission? Yes. The mere act of converting from one medium to another usually isn't transformative.

The test for writing a book is whether the author applied their own judgement in the creation of the book. Even if some explanations of concepts are inevitably similar the structure of the book, the example code, etc. will reflect the author's judgement and experience.

An LLM is incapable of authorial intent. It's not synthesizing the docs with a career of experience and the input of an editor. It's playing madlibs with the work of one or more prior authors.