MUIs paid offerings are open-core, you pay for support and a couple of extra features.
Tailwind plus looks like paying for basic components (checkboxes, sidebars, buttons) and it doesn't even offer anything like DataGrid (free with mui).
Shows Tailwind was just too little too late.
I agree on not wanting a subscription for something like this. But I also acknowledge that if people are still doing work on something post-sale (beyond bugfixes for a pre-defined support period), I should maybe expect to have to pay for that continuing work.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
(Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from Tailwind into my projects/llm).
Corporate sponsorships.
In-person training focused on big corps.
Acquisition.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.
We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.
I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.
As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.
The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.
OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
Yes.
>> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
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 existence. 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.
Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.
We call that "when the bubble pops". Can't wait.
I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.
We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.
F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.
Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.
So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.
We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.
We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.
Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.
So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).
I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).
Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.
But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?
In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.
The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?
Will those go out of business too?
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
The only problem is that it seems to have stopped sending in October.
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.
> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.
> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.
This is put forward with all the humbleness.
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 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 down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
thank you for Tailwind, Adam.
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
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.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
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.
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.
This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.
This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.
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.
If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
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 that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
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, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.
It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.
Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).
I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.
Both can be true:
- AI training on your code is success
- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue
Also, I see you haven't changed your mind much on the training LLMs being one of the major benefits of open source since the last discussion we had ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155746#44156782
On the software ecosystem? Maybe. For society? Now that's a difficult question, and I haven't really made up my mind on that yet.
On the one hand, OSS in general is a great win in terms of innovation. On the other hand, it pretty much destroyed the ability to make money on software directly in a honest way - exchanging money for providing value. This, in turn, became a major driver of turning everything into subscription, and for the surveillance economy.
Before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.).
If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).
The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?
[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.
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.
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.
Let's say I'm a company and I have this library I've developed at enormous expense. The company is happy to share it so long as competitor X a big multi-national corp doesn't get it for free. Is it better that it gets open sourced as GPL3 with commercial use on application, or better it stays closed source?
Let's say I'm a developer trying to get a job, I pour months of my time into a new project that's open source, of course I want that attached to my reputation, because that's a part of how I get my new job.
The number of people who can code for free and are happy to not attach thier name and to watch as big AI labs profit off their work while they can't afford rent is super close to 0.
There are situations that the AGPL does not cover that could be considered leeching from the commons.
I think we need stronger licensing, and binding contracts that forfeit code recipients' right to fair use in order to hinder LLM laundering, along with development platforms that leverage both to limit exploitation of the commons.
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.
LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.
Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.
I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.
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?
As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.
you know what also doesn't make sense? Take a perfectly fine, small open source project and make a business around it, then it has to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and ...
really what would tailwind have to make in order to be sustainable isn't even the question here
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
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?
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.