$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...
> 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.
As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
Now, LLMs have all but killed that side of their business. The latest models are incredibly good at writing Tailwind, to the point where no one is buying the pre-builts.
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.
Are we talking about the same CSS?
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
I spent a decent amount of time working in marketing and ad agencies, and there are absolutely still needs for custom CSS in that area, so I agree.
I was more pushing back against the idea that Tailwind will be replaced by vanilla CSS because of LLMs.
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.
If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?
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.
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.
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..
you'd be surprised
https://numpy.org/about/#sponsors https://curl.se/sponsors.html
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"..
Change the pricing model and you'll better off
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.
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)
I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?
Because people like to eat and have homes and not everyone wants to work full time on someone else's code and then come home and work full time on their own. Because paying people for the work that they do is a good thing.
I challenge the concept of "paying people for the work that they do is a good thing", at least in this context. I don't think everything needs to be profitable and paid, people can just make cool things for love and passion.
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.
Having at least several people in critical role helps protect against busses.
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.
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.
Times that by 12...
I’m sure some lucky people are raking in 1.2M p.a., but doubt the tailwind devs were.
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.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a...
That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
You do realize not every company pays well right?
A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k
So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.
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.
Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.
I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.
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.
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...
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.
I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.
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.
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.
> Vercel sponsors all of our hosting for all of our sites (which is expensive with our traffic!) for free and has for years
As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.
It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.
Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.