How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS library have employees?

The business is this: Tailwind is free. Everyone uses it. People visit their docs and eventually buy some of the things they actually sell (like books, support, etc).

With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs just directly compete with their support offering.

Doesn't make much sense to me. It's literally a conversion of CSS rules to classes. Bootstrap already had a few of these as utility classes. I know it does a bit of magic in the background.

They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.

One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.

If Tailwind wasn't making that much money, they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication.

To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1].

[1]https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...

they had over 2M in revenue in 2024... then AI happened and it likely dried up, they staffed up during the boomtime and now are rightsizing based on the change of landscape.