I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.

Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.

(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)

Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.

Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.

As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.

Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.

Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations

I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS.

I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.

The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.

I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.

Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.

Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too.

PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah!

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...

I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.

To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.

Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.