Tailwind CSS joins Shopify after 110 million weekly installs
Shopify acquires Tailwind
Tailwind Labs, the company behind the wildly popular Tailwind CSS framework, is joining Shopify. The framework, installed over 110 million times weekly and used by companies like ChatGPT, X, Cloudflare, and Reddit, will now be developed in service of Shopify's products, including storefronts, admin, and agentic commerce. The team will continue to lead and maintain Tailwind CSS and other open-source projects, which remain MIT-licensed. Commercial products like Tailwind Plus will stay available to existing customers, but new sign-ups are closing.
We built a great little website template business around Tailwind over the years, but deep down I've always wanted the framework to be developed in service of a real product.
- 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.
- fg137
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
- 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!
- ngmc
Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.
- cyrilng
Even though people aren't huge fans of Tailwind or Shopify, Tailwind honestly saved my life a few years ago.
- jedberg
With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part.
The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale.
Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.
- popupeyecare
I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good.
Bring back the series!
- PaulHoule
(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop.
(2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload.
Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?
- 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.
- kingkandu
I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers.
I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.