That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
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've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
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 similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
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.
There’s no doubt that AI has had a significant impact on this type of business model - selling premium components. That said, in 2026 there are still plenty of premium kits generating substantial revenue despite AI.
I believe something else has had a much greater impact on Tailwind UI’s business than AI, and that is shadcn, which was released in September 2023. The fact that Adam didn’t recognize this shift and adapt Tailwind UI to align with the shadcn ecosystem is, in my view, the primary reason sales have declined, not AI.
I used Tailwind UI Plus extensively before shadcn, but after its release, I lost the motivation to copy, paste, and manually modify components when I can simply pull free components (or components from another kit) directly via shadcn.
I genuinely hope Adam updates Tailwind Plus and creates a shadcn compatible registry for their components. That alone could significantly boost sales.
I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
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. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business
Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.
I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.
This is miserable all 'round. I don't know Adam from, well, Adam, but he seems a decent skin in the podcast. Nor, do I know much about Tailwind. However, I do feel for him, and his team, and his ex-team. Just miserable all 'round.
While the content is different, it’s much cheaper than Tailwind Plus. If you use AI, it may even be more useful than Plus because of the great agent rules and discord community.
i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.
Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.
How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.
I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
i bought Tailwind UI years ago and have barely used it outside of like a couple of abandoned side projects. I bought it knowing that is going to happen because it is a one-time payment, and the idea of supporting the project/Adam is prob a bigger factor that the product.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
244 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925
https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
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've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.
Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
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.
I believe something else has had a much greater impact on Tailwind UI’s business than AI, and that is shadcn, which was released in September 2023. The fact that Adam didn’t recognize this shift and adapt Tailwind UI to align with the shadcn ecosystem is, in my view, the primary reason sales have declined, not AI.
I used Tailwind UI Plus extensively before shadcn, but after its release, I lost the motivation to copy, paste, and manually modify components when I can simply pull free components (or components from another kit) directly via shadcn.
I genuinely hope Adam updates Tailwind Plus and creates a shadcn compatible registry for their components. That alone could significantly boost sales.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
Please don't fulminate on HN. Thoughtful critique is fine, rage is not. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top
While the content is different, it’s much cheaper than Tailwind Plus. If you use AI, it may even be more useful than Plus because of the great agent rules and discord community.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?
I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.
However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?