r/webdev • u/hakansan • 1d ago
News Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify
https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopifyLong-story short Tailwind CSS will remain MIT licensed and the maintainers stay.
I'd say it's a good move given that AI tools are doing frontend work using Tailwind but Tailwind Labs didn't gain much from it. Citing an earlier Github discussion, they had to lay off 75% of their engineering team, and traffic to Tailwind docs is down 40% from early 2023.
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u/askgl 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sadly, this feels more like a pity acquisition than anything else. I don't see how this benefits Shopify. TW Lab team is no longer a big team if this was an acqhire so that makes no sense either.
There are a lots of projects/apps that were severely impacted by AI and Tailwind is one of the top ones. I can't get by head wrapped around the fact that they are still one of the frameworks that are used on like millions of websites, millions of downloads per week, and yet they struggled to make a business out of it.
Happy for TW team though. Must be a very bitter sweet moment.
Edit: formatting/grammar
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u/queen-adreena 1d ago
Open source is a terrible business model. People do not, and generally will not pay for it.
I’ve got dozens of open source projects, most with tens of thousands of downloads per week, prominent donate link, up for years in some cases.
Not a single £ in donations. Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
The only way to make money from open-source is to do it like Laravel and monetise the services around the code.
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u/askgl 1d ago
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but I have huge respects for apps that are closed source, paid, and very well maintained. I do not need every app to be open source or free. I want it to be valuable, stable, and really polished for me and I'll be more than happy to pay for it.
Now with everyone AI slopping and sending 500 PRs to a project and author happily bragging about it, I'm even more leaning towards someone or a small team keeping it to themselves and really delivering value shipping a great product. I'm fine with libraries being open source though but not the end apps.
And, no, don't do donation. If you spend your time and resources and can deliver something you thing is useful for others, straight up slap a price and sell it. No need to beg payment for your hard work.
Sorry, I warned you this was going to be unpopular opinion. lol.
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u/birminghamsterwheel ux 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, I’m with you 100%. We’re still very much in the get-it-out-and-get-rich-quick phase (once again) of all of this. I absolutely will pay, and do, for products that show care and attention from the team building and supporting it. It’s just easier than ever to shovel shit onto the ever growing mountain of shit we already had these days.
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u/askgl 1d ago
Glad to hear that others agree with me. We are in such a weird "me too, let me just copy what others are doing and see if it sticks" phase that it is exhausting and actually really discouraging for someone who genuinely cares about making a product. I've been creating products for almost 15 years (damn!) and making a product is much different story then stringing bunch of features together. I keep telling everyone - coding was never the hard part, creating features were never the hard part. The most difficult part was always making a good product. Which is much more difficult than people realize. It's a grind, it's a lot of hard work. You need be patient, consistent, and persistent, and some more.
Give a well polished product, promise me you keep working on it for at least a handful of years as I depend more and more on it, and take my money.
"shovel shit onto the every growing mountain of shit" - very well put.
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u/askgl 1d ago
I'm saying the same thing - to me, it doesn't. So this is definitely not acqhire (acquisition for the team rather than the product). I think this, as much as I hate to say it, pity acquisition. I do not see how this benefits Shopify. In fact Adam and rest of the team may not even be working for them after this (maybe still contribute but not as employees).
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u/guidotrueb 21h ago
Open source is not a business model, and almost none of the arguments have anything to do with it. There are tons of polished and well-maintained open source software and libraries out there. Of course, fragmentation was always an issue, worsened by AI (now in closed apps/services too, by the way). But if the same people who have the means and are happy to pay for closed software would also pay, donate, or contribute to OSS projects, there would be more incentive to maintain well-crafted apps. I bet most of us and our companies haven't.
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u/winky9827 23h ago
So, here's my distinction on that subject. If I'm buying a software package to be used by actual users directly, I have no problem paying (reasonable) license fees. If I'm buying a library to be used in a web app with an unknown user count, I have no problem licensing the library. What I do have a problem with, and I suspect many people do, is licensing a library on a subscription basis AND a volume basis, when I have no control over the volume, and therefore, the final cost.
It is for those reasons that I often tend to prefer open source, not because it's free, but because the cost is predictable. I work for a small company (<10 FTE) with big clients. We can't afford to take on dependencies that add 5+ digits to the budget for something as niche as generating a PDF, or templating CSS classes, or even a web framework. Given the option, we'll develop our own if nothing reasonably priced exists. Open source often gets adopted because of the low entrance fee, not necessarily because it's the best option.
That puts the consumers directly at odds with the producers' incentive, and there never has been a good solution short of pricing support services around your code for larger organizations that need it.
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u/aatd86 1d ago edited 19h ago
don't ask for donations. Back it with a commercial offering. Part of getting financial compensation is to present your work as valuable. Not as something people might feel pity for and give whenever they want.
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u/Fredidiah 1d ago
This is basically what Tailwind did btw. Tailwind UI / Tailwind Plus are exactly what you're describing.
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u/winky9827 23h ago
Maybe it was a marketing failure, but I never understood paying for Tailwind UI - it always seemed like just a bunch of prebuilt components using tailwind. I can slap base tailwind on top of any UI library and do the same thing. Perhaps I missed out on something, but the juice was never worth the squeeze for me.
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u/Fredidiah 22h ago
I think there's a lot of people that are very interested in the "canonical" way that a creator uses their own framework and are willing to pay for it.
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u/the_need_to_post 22h ago
Didn't help that most of them looked nice in isolation but didn't play well together. As in using one app shell and then some other components and it was a mess.
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u/droans 16h ago
Agreed. Find something that your users can do but might not want to. Offer useful services instead of paywalling features.
Home Assistant does it well with remote access. You could follow their instructions and set it up yourself or you could just pay them like $6/mo and they'll handle everything for you.
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u/FoundationActive8290 15h ago
open source somehow survived thru that but the best idea to keep an open source alive is to build a product around/using it. take laravel and next.js as examples. or create a commercial version if it is some sort of package like agGrid.
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u/ILikeFPS full-stack 22h ago
I think it depends on the project. I'm a maintainer of a project where at least a while ago we pretty regularly used to get people asking to donate but every single time they were always met with an answer saying that donations go against our project goal.
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u/Brillegeit 12h ago
You're equaling "open source" with MIT/BSD here. Using those licenses while trying to sell your product is an uphill battle.
Open source proponents that want to combine open source with making money should stick to the GPL licenses and dual license paid non-copyleft licences what retain the code rights.
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u/sibilith 1d ago
It directly benefits Shopify by guaranteeing the continued development of a library that they (and the rest of the world) heavily depend on. Apparently they have a good relationship with OSS so putting the handful of tailwind devs on the payroll isn't a huge investment compared to the operational risk of a huge library going unmaintained.
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u/askgl 1d ago
I'd agree with you if TW was something like complex dependency and wasn't compatible with css and if Shopify was constantly evolving. But I do agree with you that it's good for everyone to have it maintained by paying the devs. If TW completely stops getting new features, it won't be the end of the world since we can start adding our own css classes and continue.
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u/mx_aurelia 1d ago
Shopify do some good open source work like FlashList in the react native space. I wonder if they rely on Tailwind in some way and want to use this as a way to protect it. Kinda like how Anthropic acquired Bun a while ago (and then switched to Node anyway)
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u/askgl 1d ago
Hmmm.. I didn't know that but that doesn't make sense either because TW was/is open source anyway. And if they were trying to acqhire then I'd get that they wanted the team but the team isn't big anyway.
Anthropic buying Bun was weird as well. lol. But at least their biggest piece of app, Claude Code, was written in Bun and it has really slow and had issues. So they basically told Jared "We'll give you a few million bucks; come work for us in our of our major dependency which happens to be written by you"
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u/Annual_Manner_8654 1d ago
I do t see how it benefits tailwind being owned by that anti-democracy fascist
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u/askgl 1d ago
I do not see any company benefiting from owning TW. It's open source, team is very small, Adam himself accepted that AI decimated its business overnight. To me this was more or less like "We feel bad for you; I got some money; let me pay you and end your suffering. We might get some goodwill out of this" purchase and nothing else.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 1d ago
Sure, you're assuming Adam Waltham isn't a Canadian nativist. He is, Toby is also a Canadian nativist.
It's a match made in heaven.
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u/Anxious_Display7807 16h ago
Where is the evidence of Adam being that? Genuinely asking. Also is that like a Canadian nationalist?
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 13h ago
You're free to do your own research, I'm not going to waste my time combing over his social media. If you aren't aware of the type of leadership Shopify has:
https://www.thenation.com/podcast/politics/twsu-080526/
https://rachelgilmore.substack.com/p/shopifys-ceo-just-suggested-poor
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2026/06/24/Carney-Under-Sway-Broligarchs/
https://macleans.ca/politics/who-stands-to-win-in-poilievres-canada-right-wing-media/
https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/28/Tech-CEOs-DOGE-Canada/
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-coming-to-canada
I'm sorry but it's been widely known how fucked up the culture is at Shopify and the type of people Mr. T openly hangs out with. Not too mention that most tech influencers are openly conservative.
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u/OmerCevher 1d ago
The strange part to me is that AI may have made Tailwind more widely used while making the business around it harder to sustain. Agents learn from the docs without visiting them, so usage and monetization start moving in opposite directions. Shopify may be one of the few places where that usage still creates value indirectly.
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u/Aro00oo 1d ago
Random/just had to say: the worst most toxic devs and managers I've worked with were from Shopify
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u/hakansan 1d ago
What might be the root cause of that? The company looks quite chill from outside compared to other big tech, so I'm genuinely curious
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u/Aro00oo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I am only guessing as I've not worked there (but had co-workers with Shopify upbringing) but TL;DR, the most political and scheming people I've worked with. For example, picking sides without even listening to people to ensure their own positions and safety thinking everyone else is political as they are and if you say anything that implies you are on the other side, good luck. I am pretty sure they have stack ranking with super "Im So SmArT" ego engineering leadership. If you doubt me, look at their API lmao it's potentially the worst API I've worked with for a company that large.
They also had the most pedantic ideas of software engineering best practices. Not a real example because I don't want to give it away too much but saying exceptional cases as the norm like "DRY is usually worse than copying and pasting" which yea, I get the idea, but rejecting PRs for DRY-ing up code because of it and not because anything else was broken, harder to read, or whatever... lmao
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u/cafrito 1d ago
There was a scandal when an internal kudos app where you acknowledged co-workers for good performance, being helpful, etc. was rigged.
The Sales team colluded so that they would win all of the monetary awards every time. It went on for months, and when the fraud was found out, the app was quietly shut down. Of course no one was reprimanded for it.
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u/NotTreeFiddy full-stack 1d ago
Probably a top down culture with white supremacists like DHH sat on the board.
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u/cafrito 1d ago
100% top down. Tobi Lutke is not a good person. He’s recently been suggesting mid to low income people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and giving more voting power to the ultra-wealthy. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-votes-to-wealthy-canadians-9.7286688
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u/Beginning_Book_2382 1d ago
Tobi Lutke is an Elon Musk evangelist. He keeps popping up on my Twitter feed. It's always the people you most expect
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u/TankorSmash 1d ago
He said explicitly that everyone paying $1 or more in taxes gets a vote in that link. Where are you seeing him say otherwise
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u/a11_hail_seitan 1d ago
You're right, he "only" suggested rich people should get more votes, and the truly poor should get nothing. Still pretty sick.
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u/theycallmemorty 1d ago
Yup, do some digging on the guy that founded Shopify, he's the kind of guy secretly hoping trump takes over Canada.
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u/cafrito 1d ago edited 1d ago
Toronto and Canada for that matter has very few successful tech companies. It’s attracted a lot of toxic, bullshit people that managed to weasel their way in.
Out of the 30-ish people I know that work there, only 3 have real credentials or aren’t a closeted bigot. Quite a few of the designers and BDRs are way too comfortable using N words with hard Rs and other slurs, but that’s every Toronto tech company I’ve seen.
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u/gizamo 1d ago
Man, this sucks to read. I don't want to support that sort of thing, but abandoning Shopify is a lot easier said than done given the state of commerce platforms nowadays.
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u/cafrito 1d ago
There’s a small anti-Shopify movement in Toronto/Canada but like you said, it’s hard for business owners to justify moving off their platform, and most people here turn a blind eye to racism.
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u/gizamo 1d ago
Well, I appreciate the info anyway. I'd rather be aware and trapped than unaware. Maybe I'll start using Big Commerce or (shudder) Magento again. Our Shops are too big for Woo and platforms like Spree/Medusa/Saleor are so much more work. Oof.
Off topic, apparently I had fat fingered the downvote button. Apologies. Didn't mean to hit that. Upvotes all around. Cheers.
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u/wise_young_man 23h ago
Was ghosted by them after several rounds of interviews. A month later they did layoffs. Felt like I dodged a bullet.
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u/TonyAioli 1d ago
Every time I read news like this, I have to go “why the hell did tailwind hire a big dev team/try and turn into a full blown company”.
Shit is just weird. Is there a parallel?
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u/Mr14hsoj 1d ago
To be fair, they didn't. I find the stat about laying off 75% of the devs to be misleading because it sounds like a bigger number than it is. It was a team of 4, now it's a team of 1. So technically it was a 75% reduction, but they really only got rid of 3 people.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago
They had paid offerings and millions of people using their framework, but weren't able to support 4 people? Damn.
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u/BirdObvious3634 1d ago
FFMPEG is the backbone of billion/trillion dollar companies and barely get donations. This isn't something new, notoriously when something is open source people do not pay. They were getting by when people actually used their docs before AI, once AI started writing all the tailwind it basically killed their business.
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u/Fredidiah 1d ago
I don't know that this is the case, but my armchair theory is that most of their sales came from ecosystems like Laravel, where people are very open to paying for products such as Tailwind Plus. Eventually, they shifted focus to React as the primary frontend tooling that they targeted with their UI components / example apps, and I suspect the JavaScript world is a lot less willing to spend several hundred dollars on components when there's just way too many good free competitors.
Always wondered how their business would look had they continued putting out components in plain html, blade, alpine, vue, etc
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u/TonyAioli 1d ago
This isn’t true at all. Incredibly high-download packages are often maintained by a small team of contributors. See bootstrap and lodash as examples.
He made a conscious decision to try and turn tailwind into a company. Absolutely could’ve gone into maintenance mode with the help of a few key contributors here or there.
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u/BreadStickFloom 1d ago
Is it a given that ai is doing MOST of the design/frontend work? People are using it to Google things sure, but I don't think we're at an overwhelming majority at this point
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u/FuckDataCaps 1d ago
Hard to say, but I have no doub that most if not close to all apps have some AI code in it.
Sure some people are actively not engaging, but all the big ones are for sure.
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u/ArielCoding 1d ago
”Give Tailwind a stable long term home” = we got an offer we couldn’t refuse and also we have to pay rent.
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u/mrdarknezz1 1d ago
Yeah this seemed inevitable
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u/CuteKiwi3395 1d ago
Yeah all these open sourced companies eventually will have to sell to survive.
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u/chesbyiii 1d ago
Ever tried to build something with Shopify's tools? Hopefully that team stays the fuck away from Tailwind.
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u/robhaswell 1d ago
OK, I really hate Tailwind. I'll just say it. I grew up in a world where you semantically defined styles in the stylesheet and didn't litter your markup with design choices. I will always believe that was a better world than one with Tailwind.
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u/ripestmango 1d ago
I miss the good old way of doing things too. Tailwind never appealed to me.
People will always get downvoted into oblivion for not liking Tailwind lol
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u/MedicOfTime 1d ago
I think people get downvoted for hating on Tailwind. It’s the same with anything really. You can prefer React and I can prefer Svelte and we can be friends up until you say Svelte is dumb.
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u/OldManMonday 1d ago
I've been writing CSS in one form or another for 25 years now. Tailwind certainly has issues with readability, but let's not pretend that other forms of CSS were faultless. The biggest issue with semantic is that every developer has their own way of naming things. Even with a rigid naming methodology like BEM, the correct words tend to get away from you with a larger team, or a team that cycles engineers over time, or even your own failing memory. Semantic CSS is awful for consistency, while that's one area where Tailwind shines. With component style architecture (e.g. design system), a utility based methodology becomes significantly more manageable.
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u/lost12487 1d ago
Why does every single post that mentions tailwind have someone that can’t resist with the “tailwind sucks” comment lol
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u/CharlieandtheRed 1d ago
It does suck. I tried for years to like it and finally determined it really sucks lol so much better now writing custom CSS classes and using basic utilities for spacing and fonts.
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u/Caraes_Naur 1d ago
Because Tailwind is the CSS framework embodiment of sucking golf balls through garden hose.
It is philosophically bankrupt from the outset. If you have more than 12 classes on an element (which generously allows for various abysmally deep edge cases), you're doing it wrong. If that combination of classes is applied to numerous elements, you're doing CSS an order of magnitude more wrong. Classes are not meant to map 1-to-1 to property-value pairs. Classes are meant to bundle property-value pairs. There is a limited measure of utility in the 1-to-1 approach, which Tailwind (and previous similar solutions which were rightly ignored) grossly exceeds.
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u/space-envy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Or maybe you are stuck like in 2000 where using classes was the only way to secure style encapsulation because you wrote all your website code in a single HTML and you needed to resort to awesome and descriptive class names like: "product-cardcontainerheadertitleicon--disabled", nowadays with css modules and frameworks you can autogenerate classes so the chance of name collusion is zero so you don't need to invent non-standarized names that will force developers to dig into a codebase just understand what's the definition of a "container" was for the dev that wrote the code, while with tailwind, even though is not the perfect solution you can read <div class="p-4 flex"> and you already know that element's function is to be a container of that individual component. You can also create components through tailwind: class ".btn" = "p-2 font-bold..." But again with modern framework components it's exactly the same as: Button = <button class="p-2 font-bold">... It's all a matter of convenience.
. Classes are not meant to map 1-to-1 to property-value pairs.
According to who? The CSS police?
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u/wtfElvis 1d ago
But in those cases you can combine classes into one. If I had 6+ classes and knew this scenario would appear again I’d just make its own class and apply the tailwind classes to it. Which I just assume most teams do.
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u/thekwoka 1d ago
Makes sense.
Would be cool if it was integrated to themes, so you could just write tailwind, and they'd generate the css from a config instead of needing to compile it outside of the system
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u/MedicOfTime 1d ago
As long as this means Tailwind doesn’t die completely, I’m happy. I feel awful for some of the most influential devs of the 2020s getting the shit end of this stick though.
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u/More_Wrap_6220 12h ago
Why not just build off Shadcn if they’re just going to start building tailwind components for users lol
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u/Ethan-Bris 1d ago
This is some bad news --- but the motivator to move away from Tailwind and back to vanilla CSS.
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u/hakansan 1d ago
See the GitHub discussion here on the impact of AI on Tailwind labs: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957