The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for"

The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?

Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.

If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.

Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer.

It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.

This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.

I am wondering why are there three owners for a commercial CSS library?

They don't only make TailwindCSS. They also make a large collection of components and templates at https://tailwindcss.com/plus

They just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee.

> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.

https://tailwindcss.com/plus

At 100k per person per month it's 400k per month (the actual cost is higher. 100k in salary is easily 150k with all the taxes included).

Times that by 12...

I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.

They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k

> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers

As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.

$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.

I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?

100k per month per person is over 1 million a year.

So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.

Most “senior devs” are actually bad.

According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.

As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.

[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...

Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.

Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.

All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].

You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.

That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.

Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.

Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.

And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.

Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels

Running one of the world’s leading UI libraries is far more impactful than anything 99% of FAANG engineers have or will ever work on.

Tailwind requires a compiler to work.

Interesting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.

If you are entertaining enough, and could livestream coding while at least topless, I think you could make some pretty buck.

Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.

CSS simply doesn't need a framework - there's no "from scratch". For humans or LLM authors.

Tailwind is a lot of overhead conceptually and tooling wise to just not have to write classnames, and it's actually anti-modular.

Supply chain risk is real. Granted in CSS it’s probably less of a concern than in code, but it cannot be denied. LLMs make the proposition of supply chain reduction not irrational at the very least.

You could prompt the LLM to define styling using inline `style` attributes; and then, once you've got a page that looks good, prompt it to go back and factor those out into a stylesheet with semantic styles, trading the style attributes for sets of class attributes.

Or you could tell the LLM that while prototyping, it should define the CSS "just in time" before/after each part of the HTML, by generating inline <script>s that embed CSS stanzas as string literals, and which immediately inject those into the document using CSSStyleSheet.insertRule(). (This can, again, be cleaned up afterward.)

Or, you can keep your CSS and your HTML separate, but also keep an internal documentation file (a "style guide") that describes how and when to use the CSS classes defined in the stylesheet. This is your in-context equivalent to the knowledge the LLM already has burned-in from training on the Tailwind docs site. Then, in your coding agent's instructions, you can tell it that when writing HTML, it should refer to the "style guide", rather than trying to reverse-engineer the usage of the styles from their implementation in CSS.

Enough that in my experience Claude is great at it and there’s even less justification for Tailwind if you’re using AI.

I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I personally know of works that way anymore.

Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.

If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.

If you're arguing down that route, LLMs can bulk-apply style attributes exactly where they're needed. Every element precisely described, no need for CSS and style-sheets at all.

Hosting, marketing, other promotional stuff (conferences, maybe other?), there are still three people on the payroll and otherwise I don't know (which was part of my point) as I've never run a business like this before myself. Oh, subscriptions to AI services... that's pricey I hear ;)