Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team • Hacker News Board

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

#831

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

>had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?

History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.

The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.

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

#832

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

ttcbj wrote: post #797

dfee wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do. The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are se…

>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.

cries in gamedev

Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.

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

#833

Post by jgoodhcg » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

ides_dev wrote: post #732

Adam goes into depth on this in an episode of his podcast: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

I didn’t know he started a new podcast!

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

#834

Post by naasking » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #264

ericmcer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI". Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.

Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs. We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers. If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'…

It does give us freedom. In fact, it arguably gives more people freedom, as non-programmers can create now simple tools to help themselves. I really don't see any way that it reduces our freedom.

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

#835

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #698

matt-p wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo? AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something tha…

Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.

I'd like to contribute to open source to help and empower people.

Your environmental mission feels moot if you do a lot to help with greenhouse emissions and then proceed to also dump all the waste in the ocean. Your mission is "accomplished" by your hands and you are recognized as a champion. but morally you feel like you took a step back and became the evil you sought to address.

Now apply that mentality to someone in FOSS who sees their work go into a trillion dollar industry seeking to remove labor as a concept from it, and the rest of society. Even of you are independently wealthy and never needed to make money to get by, you feel like your mission has failed. Even if people give you a pat on your back for the software you made.

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

#836

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

nz wrote: post #782

TeMPOraL wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.

Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observ…

That's a big reason why FOSS is going to crumble. If AI succeeds and decimates the tech labor industry, people won't have the luxury to "code for fun". Life isn't a bunch of comfy programmers working on stuff in their spare time anymore.

We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.

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

#837

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #614

port11 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer. Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. Tha…

> businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published. In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior. > LLMs are just accelerating this trend.…

>In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.

I think it's a bit too late for Tailwind to do that.

>But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it

Who's "we"? The only we here will be tech billionaires. We get shiny tools and no job. Is that a good trade-off?

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

#838

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

usef- wrote: post #600

pier25 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.

They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well. Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human…

>Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.

Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually).

Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.

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

#839

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

aatd86 wrote: post #535

LanceJones wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.

That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely. In my usage (code) they are still better than everything else I have tried. Point being that I am looking predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code output. If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a good UI, fast for common non…

>If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel

We call that "when the bubble pops". Can't wait.

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

#840

Post by phatskat » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #298

freedomben wrote: post #6

Very 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'…

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…

The lack of Figma integration or a first-party plugin was a huge bummer for me. I still use Tailwind almost religiously because it just clicked for me and I have been on enough projects with terrible SCSS organization that I want to leave that as far behind me as I can.

I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.