alt Hacker NewsShopify acquires Tailwind
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Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios...
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?
What will Shopify gain from this deal? Why everyone is buying dev tools. Earlier Anthropic bought BunJs. Can anyone explain the business model here?
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
(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?
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition.
Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me.
(I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up.
Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little.
Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations
I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS.
I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.
The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.
I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product.
Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore.
Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too.
PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah!
https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.
To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.
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.
This was definitely an acqui-hire. I'm glad Adam could find an exit like this.
Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote?
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
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.
It is an age of consolidation.
I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI.
Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them
When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.
I am interested to see what comes out of this. We are living through some interesting times to say the least.
Even though people aren't huge fans of Tailwind or Shopify, Tailwind honestly saved my life a few years ago.
I'm a very happy tailwind plus customer, I paid for their expertise on crafting good templates and best practices. Bit sad that they aren't going to add more but it was inevitable with AI cutting their lunch.
I love tailwind's work, but AI stole their customer base worse than a natural disaster would destroy a factory or other kind of business,
At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt
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.
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.
> Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack
This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.
I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues
IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?
Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!).
Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.
I see "acquire" followed by "Tail" and I get concerned. This is fine though.
God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify.
I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.
"load-bearing" - lol, nice easter egg. no one likes the AI-isms in writing!
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.
Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.
I alwasy thought they would be aquired by Vercel or maybe Anthropic but didn't see this one coming
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.
reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.
Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us.
But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.
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.