We just don't want to admit it.
AI is the easy scapegoat.
"LLMs bypass the docs."
"Cursor generates Tailwind without asking."
"Nobody visits the website anymore."
Sure. All true.
But when was the last time you paid for something you could get for free?
Exactly.
Tailwind has 75 million downloads a month.
They just fired 75% of their team.
→ npm downloads: All-time high
→ Revenue: Down 80%
→ Runway: 6 months left
Most popular CSS framework in history.
Nearly bankrupt.
Popularity is not a business model.
Shadcn gave away the same components for free.
Junior devs copy-pasted from CodePen for years.
The "premium templates" moat was made of paper.
AI didn't kill the business.
AI just automated what we were already doing for free.
And here's what really gets me:
$1M+/year in sponsorships.
Still struggling.
Blender — the entire 3D software industry's backbone — runs on $3M/year.
Tailwind needed a third of that to maintain... shorter class names?
Something doesn't add up.
They were hiring engineers at $275k.
For a CSS library.
That's not a sustainability problem.
That's a spending problem.
Now Google and Vercel suddenly show up with sponsorships.
Where were they 6 months ago when the runway was burning?
They didn't show up to save open source.
They showed up for the PR headline.
The math is brutal:
Usage ≠ Revenue.
Downloads ≠ Dollars.
npm installs ≠ Survival.
You can power half the internet and still go broke.
Stack Overflow is dying.
Tailwind almost died.
Dev blogs are ghost towns.
Any business that needs you to visit a website to make money?
Already dead. AI just signed the death certificate.
I use Tailwind every day.
I let AI write half of it.
I've never paid Tailwind a single rupee.
Neither have you.
So let's stop blaming AI.
The mirror is right there.
Who really killed Tailwind — the robots, or the culture that wants everything free?
Top comments (1)
Preach!
It's a culture thing. If you build a commercial product using open source you should really tithe (voluntary donate) at least 10% of net revenue back to the tools that you use.
I am building a product using survey.js . It is a brilliant solution and everything I need is in the free license. I am a solo developer and will be installing dozens of copies of the solution; it doesn't feel right that they shouldn't share it the revenue being generated.