Shopify acquires Tailwind

recursivedoubts

It is an age of consolidation.

LoganDark

Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.

bbg2401

The most pertinent part for many: > On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

simonw

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

spiderfarmer

Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.

yodon

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/

219283751

I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves! Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed. We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.

pil0u

They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!

codegeek

Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.

weird-eye-issue

I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model

Zarkex01

Well I guess that's good?

bingemaker

I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues

petcat

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

sceptic123

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

sikozu

Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing.

vehemenz

AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co.

nullbio

As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning. It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse. I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.

otherayden

Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years

whatthe12899

meh fuck shopify

dcchambers

Happy for Adam and his team.