Posted by kevlened 1/7/2026
We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license page now, I'm still not sure.
I want to use it in an OSS project, does that mean every drive by contributor needs a license?
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.
Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.
I agree that it's not obvious to me how or why Tailwind should turn a profit as a business, but there are examples of other similar companies turning profits, no?
I think of Motion (formerly framer motion) for example, which is primarily an animation library: https://motion.dev/
Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.
Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.
Especially as
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
and
> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
ie. data is lacking.
This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads
Where on earth did you get that idea? The web existed long before Google - Google just found a unique way to monetise other people’s content
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!
They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.
Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.