Tailwind has HUGE financial problems and may die

00:00:00: Tailwind CSS has huge financial problems.

00:00:03: It's in deep trouble and the trouble, the problems are so

00:00:07: big that it may go out of business and

00:00:11: become abandonware in the future, which hopefully

00:00:15: won't come true. And I'm confident it won't come true,

00:00:19: danger and we gotta talk about that.

00:00:20: And of course, the first reaction might be to say,

00:00:24: successful?" If you take a look at the npm

00:00:28: downloads, they are trending upwards, especially in

00:00:32: 2025. So from January 2025 on, they

00:00:35: are steeply upward trending and it makes a lot

00:00:39: of sense because of course, 2025 really was

00:00:43: the first year where AI assistance really took off

00:00:47: and where many developers, I think, started writing way more

00:00:51: code with AI. And as I mentioned before in other

00:00:55: episodes, AI has a favorite stack and that

00:00:59: favorite stack is TypeScript, which makes a lot of sense

00:01:03: because types really help produce AI better code, so that's

00:01:07: a good choice. React, Next.js, and

00:01:11: Tailwind. And of course, web development is not just about

00:01:15: JavaScript land but build something with AI and there's a very huge

00:01:19: chance that these technologies will be involved and will be used

00:01:22: automatically by AI assistants, and especially Tailwind.

00:01:26: If you want AI to add some

00:01:30: styling to a project, which you likely want, it'll almost always

00:01:34: use Tailwind for that. It's the default

00:01:38: choice, so it makes a lot of sense that this is upward trending.

00:01:41: But nonetheless, Adam, the creator of Tailwind in

00:01:45: the end, the lead of the Tailwind team and company, uh,

00:01:49: shared a post on X yesterday, a little recording, a morning

00:01:53: walk recording as he calls it, and it's essentially just him sharing some

00:01:57: thoughts and the title really says it all.

00:02:00: "We had six months left," was the title of that

00:02:04: morning walk recording. It's 33 minutes long.

00:02:08: I absolutely recommend listening to it.

00:02:10: You can speed it up, obviously, and it's- it's very helpful to

00:02:13: understand what's going on with Tailwind.

00:02:16: The gist of it is that Tailwind, the open

00:02:19: source framework, the library is more successful than ever as you can

00:02:23: clearly tell by the download numbers.

00:02:26: But the company behind Tailwind, the people that

00:02:29: develop Tailwind are in huge financial problems.

00:02:33: And the question is why? And the answer is

00:02:37: AI, so the same reason why it's so successful.

00:02:40: Because you have to understand that Tailwind the

00:02:44: company makes money by selling Tailwind

00:02:47: Plus and also Catalyst.

00:02:51: Catalyst, to my understanding, is essentially their alternative, the

00:02:54: official alternative to ShadCN you could say,

00:02:58: and Catalyst is included in Tailwind Plus.

00:03:01: If you get that, you get the two but you could also buy it standalone.

00:03:04: These are their commercial products.

00:03:07: And for years, especially before AI of course,

00:03:11: was simple. Tailwind was and is an amazing solution

00:03:15: for styling your web projects. But of course,

00:03:19: in order to use it, you have to learn it. How can you learn it?

00:03:22: Obviously with courses and so on, but you would frequently also go to their

00:03:26: documentation to find out how you can set up theming, how you can

00:03:30: use the flexbox related classes and so on.

00:03:32: You would constantly come back to their docs to look up how to,

00:03:36: uh, do a certain styling, how to use a

00:03:40: certain CSS feature with Tailwind essentially.

00:03:43: And of course, if you landed on their site, there

00:03:47: that Plus feature, and that you would look at it and see, "Oh,

00:03:51: okay. Plus, that is pre-built UI blocks and

00:03:55: some useful components or things I might need on my site.

00:03:59: So yeah, why not buy it and get access to all these official

00:04:03: blocks and templates that still use Tailwind but that give

00:04:06: me code snippets I can use in my projects." That was the

00:04:10: idea. And that of course worked very well.

00:04:13: By the way, that's of course the idea of many, many,

00:04:17: not just open source businesses. Many businesses, for example,

00:04:21: myself included. I also lived

00:04:25: off people coming to my websites

00:04:28: from Google to read some articles which they found on Google, for

00:04:32: example, and then if they would land on my

00:04:36: also might buy some courses. Now, I have other distribution channels

00:04:40: as well, and this video is not about me but this

00:04:44: business model, not just for me or Tailwind but for many

00:04:47: projects and sites out there. You live off people

00:04:51: coming to your website and consuming your free content because

00:04:55: people might then buy some paid content, and that business model is of

00:04:59: course now eroding, not just for Tailwind, as mentioned for many,

00:05:02: many other businesses and sites out there too.

00:05:05: But for Tailwind, it's eroding because of two

00:05:08: main reasons. The first reason affects many other

00:05:12: sites and companies as well. People use AI for answers,

00:05:16: so instead of going to the original source, instead of going to the Tailwind

00:05:20: docs, they ask ChatGPT if they wanna know something, if

00:05:24: they wanna look something up related to Tailwind.

00:05:27: But then there also is a second factor and that is of course that

00:05:30: AI assistants produce the actual code,

00:05:34: so you don't even have to look up anything related

00:05:38: to Tailwind, at least very often you don't have to....

00:05:42: AI already knows it because it was trained on so many repositories that

00:05:46: used Tailwind because it, of course, had access to those docs.

00:05:49: It consumed all the content from there and if anything is missing, your

00:05:53: AI assistant might just access the docs on the fly but automatically,

00:05:57: not you visiting them, and therefore, AI gives you the finished

00:06:01: code that you as a developer might not even need to understand Tailwind

00:06:04: or want to understand Tailwind. In this morning walk recording,

00:06:08: Adam shares that revenue is down 80%,

00:06:12: traffic is down 40%, and they had to lay off

00:06:16: 75% of their team, which is three people, so not a

00:06:20: lot you might say, but essentially that's almost the entire

00:06:24: obviously almost the entire company, because they're in huge

00:06:28: financial troubles and if they had not laid off these people,

00:06:32: they would only have six months left.

00:06:34: That was the reason. And that, of course,

00:06:39: is so, so sad and really frightening

00:06:42: because it's the most successful styling library out

00:06:46: there due to AI and they're not benefiting

00:06:50: of it. And Adam did not just share this

00:06:54: He also shared a, a post in the end in a

00:06:57: GitHub pull request that was open for the Tailwind website

00:07:01: where the pull request basically wanted to add a llms.txt

00:07:05: endpoint to the Tailwind website.

00:07:07: And the idea behind such a llms.txt endpoint is in the end to

00:07:11: make it simpler for AI, for AI agents

00:07:15: to read and understand the Tailwind documentation, therefore produce

00:07:18: better Tailwind code. And other websites, for example, like

00:07:22: BetterOff have endpoints like this so that agents

00:07:26: can easily navigate their docs, and read their docs, and extract

00:07:30: irrelevant information. But this pull request was closed with

00:07:34: Adam replying yesterday that he would love to have a feature like

00:07:38: this but that, of course, they need that traffic to their website and

00:07:42: if they make it even easier for AI to use Tailwind without

00:07:46: people visiting the website, they are essentially cutting

00:07:50: into their own flesh and they might reach a point where they

00:07:54: can't sustain Tailwind anymore, keep on developing it

00:07:58: anymore. He mentions the term abandonware

00:08:01: becoming abandonware if they can't financially sustain it in

00:08:05: very post. And, of course, as I mentioned, this is a huge problem for many

00:08:09: sites that depend on search traffic to also sell

00:08:13: something, which is their business model because due

00:08:16: AI, many Google searches, 60% of Google

00:08:20: searches end without a click to a website,

00:08:24: according to this overview or this summary of various

00:08:28: studies on the topic. And that is, of course, a huge problem and the

00:08:31: problem, of course, is that AI is a

00:08:35: technology that used and uses all these information

00:08:39: sources for free essentially to

00:08:42: gather that knowledge, let's call it gather, one could also say

00:08:46: steal, to then make it available to their users

00:08:50: paying for the usage of AI without crediting the original

00:08:54: creators of that information. But let's be very clear

00:08:57: here. This will lead to a world where there will

00:09:01: no high quality free information out there anymore

00:09:05: and where projects or frameworks like Tailwind

00:09:09: might just not exist anymore in the future

00:09:12: if the creators of those projects can't figure out another way of

00:09:16: monetizing it, which, of course, will probably mean that stuff that

00:09:20: used to be free will not be free anymore in the future.

00:09:24: That is the reality because, of course you can complain

00:09:28: all day about them being greedy and that

00:09:32: they should not be in the way of AI because it makes all

00:09:36: our lives easier, and I would agree with the fact

00:09:40: that AI makes coding

00:09:43: easier. It, it definitely changes coding.

00:09:46: It can make you more productive, I've said that before. I use AI a lot.

00:09:50: I would agree with that. But it's not greedy to

00:09:53: run a business. It's not greedy that you want to get paid for your work.

00:09:57: You want to get paid for your work too, right?

00:10:00: I mean, that is the same thing with online

00:10:03: I had people before tell me that education should be free

00:10:07: and courses should therefore not cost money.

00:10:10: Yeah, but that is my job. Just like you, I want to get paid for my

00:10:14: job and if I'm not getting paid, if I can't earn money off that,

00:10:18: for Tailwind of course, I'm going to find another job and

00:10:22: that is probably not in your interest either.

00:10:24: And I'm saying you, I don't mean you. May- maybe I mean you.

00:10:27: You get what I mean. So, yeah. It's a

00:10:31: really bad situation for Tailwind.

00:10:34: It's really, really bad and I hope that

00:10:38: they can figure out a way to earn

00:10:42: money in the future and not go out of business because,

00:10:46: Tailwind is amazing, and even though you can, of course,

00:10:50: style websites without Tailwind and maybe you even should give

00:10:53: modern CSS features a try and write vanilla CSS

00:10:57: code again or have AI write it, even though that's all true,

00:11:01: Tailwind is amazing. Tailwind is popular.

00:11:04: Tailwind is being used by ShadCN and so, so many websites out there.

00:11:08: I really hope they can find a way to monetize their

00:11:12: work and, of course, it's not just them.

00:11:13: It will be many, many businesses out there as I mentioned.

00:11:16: If you wanna support them right now, you can do that.

00:11:20: Buy Plus, buy Catalyst, buy

00:11:24: Refactoring UI, which is a book co-authored by

00:11:28: Adam which I also bought which is amazing, is all about how to

00:11:32: style websites, build great designs, and it's, it's a really

00:11:36: good book for getting better at design.

00:11:39: Support them like this if you want to and if you can afford it, of

00:11:43: course, because, yeah, otherwise AI might

00:11:47: kill the very thing here that was part of making it

00:11:51: useful and that's not really what we want, I guess.