[ricardobeat]

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

[tpmoney]

Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses.

$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.

[1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

[AlecSchueler]

The question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.

[andruby]

The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for"

The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?

Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.

[Maro]

> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)

Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.

bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.

As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..

[FelipeCortez]

> doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.

you'd be surprised

https://numpy.org/about/#sponsors https://curl.se/sponsors.html

[Maro]

Great point, thanks for making it. Following onward, NumPy has a non-profit called Numfocus who is behind it:

https://numfocus.org/

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/454...

Apparently they have an annual budget of ~$10M. From the contributors, it's easy to recognize the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (so Meta), Google, MSFT. This is great.

Having said that, I'd still say that $1-2M for a CSS library seems more than enough. Not everything needs to be "scaled"..

[patates]

When very important tooling does not have very impressive funding, you get the xkcd 2347 situation very quickly.

[rurban]

Not very important. Just sugar for webdevs.

Change the pricing model and you'll better off

[no-name-here]

That’s the All Modern Digital Infrastructure relying on a dependency a Nebraskan has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 one: https://xkcd.com/2347/

[apublicfrog]

> The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?

My question is why does it need one? Most web libraries I've used for the last few decades have not had any corporate structure and certainly haven't made a profit. They're done because someone wanted to showcase their skills and others got involved to help, or for fun or because a company who does something else built them internally and decided to open source.

We don't need to apply capitalism to everything. Not everything needs a profit and scale.

[rapatel0]

Profit is the life blood of a business. It’s what pays for, mistakes, new ideas, responding to changes in the market. It tells you your are doing good things and that you are doing them well

It’s the engineering tolerance that allows a company to operate and remain reliable.

It’s amazing to me that engineers don’t understand this concept.

(Clarification, not talking about excess profits)

[apublicfrog]

I think you've missed my point. Most of the libraries I'm talking about are not part of a business. And they didn't need anything to pay for mistakes, new ideas, etc.

I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?

[AlecSchueler]

So the millions of dollars are going towards marketing and suchlike you mean?

[andruby]

I don't understand. Does Tailwind spend money on marketing? Afaik they mostly spend on salaries and probably a bit on hosting/infra.

[sonofhans]

If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.

[AlecSchueler]

This doesn't really answer my question and is quite a flippant response. I didn't claim I could do better, I'm asking why they need so many resources to do what they do.

[exceptione]

Maybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs.

As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.

[reassess_blind]

It is. That’s why Tailwind had to lay off 75% of their staff.

[AlecSchueler]

But they're still struggling for money.

[mexicocitinluez]

Nah, Tailwind is way more important for LLMs than vanilla CSS.

Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.

Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.

I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.

[IsTom]

> limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable

Are we talking about the same CSS?

[mexicocitinluez]

lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.

[jpalomaki]

Agents are not yet very good at figuring out how things look on the screen.

Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.

[tpmoney]

Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer.

[toddmorey]

It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.

This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.

[troupo]

They don't only make TailwindCSS. They also make a large collection of components and templates at https://tailwindcss.com/plus

[robertjpayne]

Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central.

If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?

[omnimus]

Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.

The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.

[d1sxeyes]

What’s the problem with the lifetime purchase?

[hennell]

It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.

[corobo]

It takes the recurring out of recurring revenue, 100% churn

[plagiarist]

I am wondering why are there three owners for a commercial CSS library?

[whatevaa]

You have one developer. He gets hit by a bus. Now you are fucked.

Having at least several people in critical role helps protect against busses.

[MobiusHorizons]

Sponsorships are a supplemental income stream, though, right? They have paid services in addition as I understand it. So covering several full time developers seems pretty good sponsorship wise, when the maintenance should be fairly simple at this point given the maturity of the offering and the tech stack. It’s not like they have to keep up with security vulnerabilities or a mobile version update churn.

[tweetle_beetle]

They just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee.

> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.

https://tailwindcss.com/plus

[agloe_dreams]

The answer really is that they were spending an amount of that money on devs who were working on tailwindUI / Plus - their paid product.

[leetrout]

They were posting a job for $250k last year.

[solarkraft]

That’s an incredible amount of labor. What were they spending it on?

[ericmcer]

Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before.

That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.

[runako]

> 3 motivated developers and a designer

Curious how much cash folks think it takes to cover this headcount. I have a feeling people are wildly underestimating the cost of a team this size.

[troupo]

At 100k per person per month it's 400k per month (the actual cost is higher. 100k in salary is easily 150k with all the taxes included).

Times that by 12...

[d1sxeyes]

100k/mo is off by an order of magnitude.

I’m sure some lucky people are raking in 1.2M p.a., but doubt the tailwind devs were.

[omnimus]

Kudos to them afaik they were trying to pay their people well. I think they were paying more than 100k/year. I remember they had open position for double that.

[filoleg]

Sure, but even 200k/year is an order of magnitude less than 1.2mil/year (which is what the great-grandparent comment claimed, given their 100k/mo estimate).

[corobo]

100k a month?? Well there's yer problem lmao

[troupo]

My brain farted :)

[selcuka]

> That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient

That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.

[jacquesm]

That's how bloat happens.

[maxloh]

One could compare the main branch against its state from one year ago to find out if the core product justifies this scale. I would say that, more likely than not, it isn't.

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...

[hu3]

TIL they use Bun:

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a...

[easymuffin]

Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.

[birken]

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support?

That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

[eek2121]

FAANG isn't the world.

Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.

[tracerbulletx]

I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.

[FootballMuse]

They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k

[Guillaume86]

Well that explains it then, don't offer stupid salaries before you make stupid money...

[ryanSrich]

> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers

As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.

$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.

[troupo]

100k per month per person is over 1 million a year.

So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.

[d1sxeyes]

100k per year.

[narmiouh]

I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?

[FridgeSeal]

120k USD ~= 180k AUD, which is a rate I have _definitely_ seen advertised for Seniors in Sydney + Melbourne.

[selcuka]

I'm in Brisbane, but salaries are wildly different between US and AU. The exchange rate is not a good approximation. We don't see many US$275K (AU$410K) remote jobs [1] advertised in Australia either.

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

[zdragnar]

Most metro areas in the Midwest, I think. Certainly the ones near me, at least.

[shimman]

Sure. Boston, NYC, Seattle, basically any city in the US you will find senior devs being hired at that price range.

You do realize not every company pays well right?

[estearum]

Most “senior devs” are actually bad.

[trollbridge]

There are plenty of software firms out there (including the one I work for) whose entire budget is less than $1MM, and who have a headcount of developers that's more than 2.

Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.

[babypuncher]

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

[SXX]

Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.

Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.

And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.

[zeroCalories]

Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels

[mcny]

That's good. We can tell people that so they will submit us patches for free.

Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification.

I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.

[raincole]

Blender pays their developers ~ $3M/year. [0]

I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.

[0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.

[tpmoney]

According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.

As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.

[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...

[sebmellen]

That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.

[hennell]

Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.

Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.

All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].

You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.

[cardanome]

Or like 10 senior engineers in mid sized companies in Europe.

I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.

[rwyinuse]

One million a year would easily buy you 10 experienced full-time engineers in most of Europe.

[knowitnone3]

Tailwind is not a FAANG, they are glorified frontend CSS devs

[siquick]

Running one of the world’s leading UI libraries is far more impactful than anything 99% of FAANG engineers have or will ever work on.

[likium]

Tailwind requires a compiler to work.

[geodel]

Huh, FAANG salary comes at FAANG level revenue / profitability generated. That salary is not some kind of human right.

[ryanSrich]

That's barely two low level faang engineers after full load.

[buzzerbetrayed]

Failwind? Alewind? Nailwind? Galewind?

I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.

[mrgoldenbrown]

CSS the standard is still getting updated, browsers are still updating and making their own slightly different interpretations of the standard, so a CSS library can't be "complete" except for a moment in time.

[greatgib]

We are probably in a situation like the one of Firefox or wikipedia.

A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.

Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.

As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.

[gt0]

I thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.

[knowitnone3]

money from sponsorships AND money from the PRO version. must be nice

[shit_game]

I'd imagine that infrastructure costs are rather significant for Tailwind, and that there are non-neglibible organizational costs as well.

[coder543]

Every app that uses tailwind builds a custom CSS bundle. Tailwind Labs does not host those; whoever is making the app has to figure out their own hosting. So I’m not seeing the significant infrastructure costs?

Even if Tailwind were a shared hosted system like the common bootstrap CDNs of old… CDNs are dirt cheap for a small text file, even if it were loaded billions of times a month.

Some back of the napkin math suggests that it would cost about $300 per billion downloads for the current bootstrap.min.css file (gzip compressed, naturally) at North American network prices on one CDN I’ve used before. Or just $150 per billion globally if you're willing to use fewer PoPs. With browser caching, even split per domain, a billion downloads covers a very large number of users for a very large number of page loads.

[Maxious]

infrastructure costs are already covered

> Vercel sponsors all of our hosting for all of our sites (which is expensive with our traffic!) for free and has for years

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468

[bpiroman]

100% agree. If an open source project needs money to run, then isn't that defeating the purpose of being open source? Open source is a gift economy. If the owner can monetise it on the side then that is just a bonus.

[pcthrowaway]

Why should the license model of the source code prevent developers from making a living? Why should companies which release their software under proprietary licenses also be the only ones able to profit from it?

As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.

[jackconsidine]

Interesting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.

[groby_b]

Open Source never was "a gift economy".

It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.

[musicjerm]

Yes, open source career dev here, pls subscribe to my onlyFans

[WesolyKubeczek]

If you are entertaining enough, and could livestream coding while at least topless, I think you could make some pretty buck.

Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.