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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#581

Post by munificent »

legitster wrote: post #181

It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something . Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it reco…

> It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.

You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#582

Post by Aurornis »

dfee wrote: post #384
Aurornis wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money. Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and simila…

alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down? i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment dow…

> alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.

The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.

If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#583

Post by eudamoniac »

jonas21 wrote: post #101
ceejayoz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have off-GH sponsorship that's much more widely subscribed. https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor

Yeah, it's apparently pulling in over $800K in annual revenue [1]. EDIT: Doing the math on the sponsor list, it's probably around $1M in ARR now. [1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/

I'm sorry but it simply does not cost a million dollars to maintain Tailwind, a CSS library that has no compelling reason to ever change at this point.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#584

Post by eudamoniac »

simonw wrote: post #117
simlevesque wrote: post #111

[flagged]

WTF? So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?

The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#585

Post by lone-cloud »

K0nserv wrote: post #530
lone-cloud wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.

It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.

shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#586

Post by ibejoeb »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #569
ibejoeb wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product. If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they ar…

Agreed. If Tailwind could give you a paid subscription to a service that plugs into your agent and will recommend component compositions, styles, etc. (basically how those web app generators companies work but targeted at experienced devs) they have a chance to survive the transition.

Presumably the MCP could also be aware of the commercial products, which ought to coax the agent to apply those patterns. That'd be more useful than actually have the library.

This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#588

Post by immibis »

insin wrote: post #189
immibis wrote: post #137

Can 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?

The advantage is in both the speed of the shorthand when transferring the CSS you know you need for a layout from your brain to the element (flex items-center gap-2 vs. display: flex; align-items: center; gap: .5rem; - just try typing them both out), plus all the stuff inline styles can't do, such as variants based on screen size, colour scheme, user preference, pseudo-classes, parent/sibling state, etc. which you ca…

I don't see a significant difference between your two examples.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#589

Post by immibis »

llmslave2 wrote: post #574
immibis wrote: post #137

Can 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?

Can you modify your style tag to make the background turn purple on a mobile device? No? Ok.

If that's your goal, you probably shouldn't call the class bg-blue? It should be bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile. But then it's definitely so specific it's the wrong way to select a style. If you want the page background to be blue but purple on mobile, write that in your CSS with a selector of "body" instead of ".bg-blue-but-purple-on-mobile"

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#590

Post by scoot »

f311a wrote: post #537
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was 250-300k TC. Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.

It’s still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month

Revenue is not profit
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