In January 2026, Tailwind CSS, the most popular CSS framework in the world with millions of users, almost went out of business when founder Adam Wathan said on GitHub that they had to let off 75% of their technical team because their sales had dropped by 80%. This wasn't terrible management or a technical failure; it was a direct strike from how quickly AI has changed how developers learn and produce code. People that use Tailwind or want to know how open-source projects can live in a world run by AI should pay attention.
You need to find out why the Tailwind CSS business model failed.
How to Make Money the Old-Fashioned Way
Before AI, Tailwind's model was easy: the framework is free, but the docs get people to buy things. Developers went to the docs to fix styling issues and found premium products like Tailwind Plus ($299 for 500+ components), Tailwind UI, Catalyst, and Insiders. Some of them even became paying customers. That funnel worked well enough in the 2020s to turn a side project into a multimillion-dollar business with its own engineering team. Then AI came along and messed everything up.
How AI Changed the Rules for the 40% Traffic Collapse
The numbers say it all. Doc traffic dropped 40% between early 2023 and January 2026—meanwhile, more developers than ever were actually using Tailwind. That's the paradox at the heart of this mess. Nobody quit the framework; they just stopped needing the website. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Cursor—these tools answer syntax questions and spit out components on the spot. Why bother visiting the docs when your editor hands you working code? The pipeline from "reads documentation" to "buys premium product" simply collapsed.
The Effect on Sales: Not Good
In less than three years, sales dropped by 80%.
The drop in traffic hurt sales even more than the numbers showed. Wathan said that sales fell by about 80%. It wasn't a slow decline; it was a collapse that put the company's future at risk. In 2024, Tailwind Labs made more than $800,000 from sponsorships, but by January 2026, that amount had dropped to about 20% of its peak revenue. Not enough to pay four engineers, even if they are cheap. The money from sponsorships helped, but it only paid for maintenance. It wasn't the kind of investment that would have moved the framework forward, fixed problems, or added features that could have stopped the bleeding in the first place.
The Paradox: Growing and Shrinking at the Same Time
Some people may not want to admit that this is a paradox. In 2025 and 2026, the most people used Tailwind CSS. npm download stats show that Tailwind is the most popular CSS framework in the world, with more than 75 million downloads every month. The State of CSS 2025 poll showed that Tailwind CSS has the most happy users and the most people who stick with it of all CSS frameworks. This is a remarkable achievement that shows how much the developers care about the product.
Companies are using it more quickly. Big IT firms, new businesses, and development teams all use Tailwind as their default styling tool. As part of their web development curriculum, colleges began to teach Tailwind. A lot of fresh junior developers in 2025 and 2026 thought Tailwind was just as good as expert CSS development because they saw it everywhere. It was tougher to explain how awful the money situation was after this win. Wathan pointed out the contradiction in his GitHub comment: "Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it has ever been, and our revenue is down close to 80%." This is a new problem in software economics, where traditional measures of business success don't match up with actual revenue generation.
The End of Open-Source Search with AI Tools
How AI code lets people break the rules
AI ruined Tailwind's business model in a certain way. Tailwind made money through its documentation, just like many other open-source projects. Developers found the docs, learnt the framework, and found paid products. That pipeline worked. Then, AI models that had been trained on those same documents started to write Tailwind code directly. When a developer tells Claude or Cursor to make a component, the AI sends out patterns it learnt from official sources without ever sending anyone to the real site. Developers get code that works quickly enough that they don't need to look at the docs. The funnel that turned free users into paying customers? AI just went around it.
Some AI-powered website builders that employ Tailwind CSS as their core framework are Lovable, Bolt.new and Vercel's v0. Some people state that these companies make millions or even tens of millions of dollars a year by using Tailwind as a big component of their company. Tailwind Labs doesn't gain any money from being famous either. Some people in the development community thought this was unfair because venture-backed AI businesses were making money from open-source work without paying the people who maintain it up.
What the Sponsorship Model Can and Can't Do
Tailwind Labs pushed hard for sponsorships when things got bad, and it worked. By 2025, they had raised more than $800,000 from supporters like Cursor, Vercel, and other partners in the ecosystem. That helped, but it's not a solution. Companies can cut their budgets or just walk away from sponsorships. The amounts don't often match what sales of the product brought in during the good years. And there's always the issue of conflicts: how fair are the project's choices if a sponsor is also a competitor of Tailwind? In the meantime, it costs a lot of money to keep a framework this popular and complicated running, including for performance, security, browser updates, and the community. Sponsorships can buy time, but they can't replace a business model that works.
What happened after January 6, 2026
How the community responded to the layoffs
On January 6, 2026, Tailwind Labs cut their engineering team from four to one. Three developers—talented people who had helped build Tailwind into what it was and understood the codebase deeply—were let go. Wathan called after seeing a GitHub pull request that was supposed to make the documentation easier for AI language models to read.
It was hard to understand what the community said, but it was helpful. A lot of developers felt bad for Wathan and the Tailwind team because they knew how hard it was to work with AI. Some people have great ideas for new ways to run a business. But some of the answers showed that people were angry. People in the area said that Tailwind Labs had made enough money from sponsorships (more than $800,000) to hire three tech experts to help with problems. They weren't sure if the layoffs were necessary because of the budget or for other strategic reasons.
Making good choices about AI and paperwork
Someone sent in a pull request to make Tailwind's docs easier for AI to read after the layoffs. Usually not a big deal—better documentation helps everyone. But Wathan said no. His reasoning was that if AI makes it easier to scrape the docs, fewer people will visit the site, fewer will find paid products, and revenue will drop faster. Some people thought it was short-sighted, while others thought it was a harsh truth about what maintainers have to deal with when AI takes over their business model. Wathan said, "Making it easier for LLMs to read our documents just means less traffic... I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized documents that don't make that situation even worse."
When developers move to a new CSS framework, they need think about the following:
Material UI and systems of pre-made parts
In the first few months of 2026, developers began to worry about how long Tailwind CSS would last. Because of this, people began to search for different CSS frameworks that would be more dependable or provide fresh design options. Material UI is one of the most interesting choices. It's a huge collection of React components that don't work the same way as Tailwind does.
Material UI is different because it has pre-made components that follow Google's Material Design. You can change them with props instead of utility classes. That means that the styling will be the same right away, without having to write a lot of CSS. The community is big, the documentation is good, TypeScript support is there, and MUI Inc. makes money selling enterprise components and tools. This is a less AI-exposed revenue model than Tailwind's doc-dependent funnel. What are the trade-offs? More configuration, bigger bundle sizes since you're importing a full component library, and a steeper learning curve if you want to change the default look. Teams should think about whether ready-made, opinionated components really work for their project or if they need more control.
Bootstrap remains a strong long-term choice
Bootstrap has been around since 2011, and while many dismissed it when Tailwind took off, developers came back to it in 2025–2026 once they remembered how much time pre-built components save. The strengths haven't changed: massive component library, solid browser support, huge community, thorough docs. It's still a staple in schools and enterprises, with plenty of legacy codebases running on it. And unlike projects dependent on one maintainer, Bootstrap has institutional backing—which means more stability and less anxiety about long-term support.
DaisyUI, Pico.css, and Minimalist Approaches are some fresh choices.
Some tools emerged to fill gaps in Tailwind. DaisyUI adds pre-built components while keeping Tailwind's flexibility—perfect for developers tired of assembling everything from scratch. If you don't trust CSS frameworks at all, there's stuff like Pico.css and Open Props. Pico just styles your HTML directly—no classes, no fuss. Open Props gives you a bunch of CSS variables to tweak without the bloat. Both attract developers who think Tailwind is too much or just want to write normal HTML. Downside? Way smaller communities and fewer resources than Bootstrap or Tailwind.
Can Tailwind CSS produce money? The Problem with Making Money
A lot of folks are talking and making estimates about what's going on in the area right now.
People were scared that Tailwind might start charging money after the layoffs in January 2026. People in the community came up with ideas like freemium, subscriptions, API pricing, and acquisition, but Wathan shut them down. Tailwind CSS will always be free and have an MIT license. He knows that changing that would divide the community and push everyone towards other options.
What will happen to paid features and premium items in the future?
The fundamental foundation will still be free, but Tailwind's premium offerings, such as Tailwind Plus, UI, and Catalyst, will need to change. When AI changes how developers find and use tools, old playbooks don't work anymore. AI-powered customisation that turns plain English into Tailwind code, performance and auditing tools that make package sizes smaller, or enterprise services like training, architecture advising, and priority support might all be new ways to make money. People and businesses will pay for things that save them time or help them with actual problems. The wild card? Getting direct payment from AI businesses is really hard. If the docs and code of a framework are used to train products that make billions, maybe the people who made it should get a cut. That would change open source completely, but it needs legal structures that aren't there yet. At this point, it's more of a notion than a fact.
What we think will happen and what we don't know about the future
A few things seem clear. Core Tailwind CSS stays free and open source—changing that now would blow up the community and push people toward alternatives. Premium products need a serious rethink to matter in an AI-driven dev world. Sponsorships help but won't fund real growth. Beyond that, the future's uncertain. Will some features go paid? Subscriptions? New revenue streams nobody's thought of yet? Hard to say. But the math is obvious: one revenue channel isn't enough. Expect parts of the Tailwind ecosystem—better components, new tooling, enterprise support—to eventually cost money. The core framework stays free; everything around it is up for grabs.
Should you stop using Tailwind? How to rate your work
Taking a look at the hazards that are unique to each project
Don't worry if Tailwind is working for you. The framework won't suddenly stop working because it's too popular. If Tailwind Labs went away tomorrow, the community would fork it and keep it going. The framework itself isn't the problem—it's whoever's running the show making calls that burn users. For new projects, there's no easy answer. How much uncertainty can your team live with? How long does this thing need to last? Who's maintaining it two years from now? If Tailwind's shaky future bothers you, figure out what bailing out later actually costs. But if you just need to ship and don't care about pixel-perfect control, the community and tooling might still be worth rolling the dice.
It's preferable to have good options, like Material UI. If your worries about Tailwind's future come true and premium features do become paid, it will be easy to convert to Material UI because it already has a way to make money and a library of components. This choice makes it safer to utilise Tailwind on new projects.
Here are a few ways to move if you choose to:
If you want to stop using Tailwind, don't take everything out at once. Use both frameworks at the same time. For new items, use Material UI. For old things, get rid of Tailwind code little by little. You may also utilise a mix of methods, like DaisyUI, that let you add components without fully removing Tailwind. Before you go, make sure you know what success looks like in terms of how big the bundle is, how fast it builds, how happy the team is, and how consistent the design is. If not, you're merely moving code around. And spend money on training. People who know how to use the new tools will make the change go more smoothly and prevent making silly mistakes.
What professionals should know and what the development team should be worried about
Getting Better in a World That Changes
The Tailwind situation is a good example of how being too good at one tool can backfire. It's still useful to learn Tailwind, but don't skip the basics. You can use CSS concepts like layout, box model, flexbox, grid, and custom properties in any situation. Developers who know the basics well can quickly learn new frameworks. Those who only know how to use Tailwind syntax get stuck when things change. Keep your mind open, try out new tools, and pay attention to what's new. What seems unimportant now might be important later.
Buying a Business and Risk Assessment
People that utilise Tailwind for a multitude of things should carefully assess the dangers to make sure the construction is sturdy and will last. You don't have to stop using Tailwind; you just need to make careful that decisions about standardisation are based on what could truly happen.
Teams can lower their risk in a few ways: by not being tied to one framework, by getting to know experts who know a lot of different technologies, and by sponsoring Tailwind if it's an important part of your stack. This will help the project move forward and let you have a say in where it goes.
Companies that need support from professionals could also hire outside expertise to look at all of their alternatives for a framework in great depth. When it comes to identifying the level of risk an organisation is prepared to tolerate, the requirements of a project, and the long-term ramifications of maintenance, consultants can offer a more impartial perspective than internal teams. This is because the people who work for the company have to apply technology that has already been bought and funds that aren't really important.
What This Means for the Future of Open Source in the Big Picture
Things that folks who work with open source can learn
The Tailwind crisis isn't just about one framework—it exposed cracks in how open source actually works. A project can be massively popular and still broke. Tailwind's usage, satisfaction, and market share were at all-time highs while revenue dropped 80%. That breaks the old assumption that adoption leads to money. AI changed the game: companies can now extract value from open-source work without ever driving traffic to docs or paying for premium tiers.
The other lesson is about diversification. Tailwind leaned too hard on documentation-driven sales—when AI cut off that pipeline, there was no backup plan. Projects with multiple revenue streams—sponsorships, training, consulting, hosted solutions—weathered this better. Tailwind's sponsorship push pulled them out of the hole, but it also showed what should've been in place from the start.
What experts think the future holds for the industry
Tailwind's mess is going to ripple across the industry. More open-source projects will start cutting deals with AI companies—revenue splits, licensing arrangements, whatever they can figure out. One-time product sales won't cut it anymore; subscriptions and direct funding through GitHub Sponsors or OpenCollective will carry more weight. And here's the thing: being honest about money and decisions isn't just nice—it's a survival strategy. Wathan laid everything out in the open, and the community stuck around. Projects that play it close to the chest? They won't get that same loyalty when the wheels come off.
What I think about the AI Monetisation Question and what will happen next.
Companies that make AI are making a lot of money off of open-source frameworks but not giving anything back. They teach models using public documents and code, but they don't give anything back to projects. This is a one-way flow of money from innovators to big tech companies. In the next two to three years, there is a 60–70% chance that some kind of pay scheme will come out, like licensing per API call, revenue sharing, or forced sponsorship. Just like how Google pays news sites, but for software.
What do you get out of it? It looks bad. How do you figure out how much to pay someone when a framework is only a small part of the training data? The law isn't very strong, and no one knows how it will be enforced. We think that AI-aware monetisation will change, but it won't be enough to save open source. It will be one part of donations, premium levels, and sponsorships.
Advice for Development Teams That Will Help
Things to Do in the Next 6 to 12 Months
If your team uses Tailwind, this is what makes sense. You can still use it; nothing is damaged, and it's still free and up to date. But keep linked in: follow Wathan, monitor the official channels, and don't get caught off guard. If things go wrong, you can get out of it if your personnel know CSS and not simply Tailwind syntax. Know who to call for aid outside of your group. If Tailwind is important to you, pay for it. Sponsorship isn't giving money away; it's paying for a seat at the table and working to fix the problem that generated this disaster in the first place.
A medium-term strategy comprises identifying goals over the following 12 to 24 months.
Over the next year or two, teams should architect their apps so they're not married to any single CSS framework. Keep styling separate from logic—that way, swapping frameworks doesn't mean gutting the whole codebase.Should you look at Material UI or something else? Maybe. But don't dump Tailwind just because of headlines. Think about what actually matters: will it last, does it fit your needs, how much upkeep does it demand? Some teams will stick with Tailwind anyway. Others will decide the risk isn't worth it. Both are valid.
Stop treating frameworks like religions. Learn what else exists. Know the tradeoffs. Teams that understand multiple options can pivot fast when they need to.And get involved in the bigger conversation—how do we actually keep open-source alive? Fair pay for maintainers, sustainable business models, what we owe the tools we depend on. These aren't abstract debates. They're deciding what this industry looks like going forward.
Building a strong technical basis.
The Tailwind case strengthens some basic rules of architecture. Don't mix your app logic with your styling. Don't put framework-specific code all over the place. Put it in style modules so that you don't have to rewrite everything when you switch frameworks. Write down your patterns and choices so that teams can see what's going on when things change.
The same is true for design choices: write them down separately from the framework you're using. This way, the visual layer stays the same even if the tech below changes. And use automated tools to check how you're using CSS. You can better estimate the cost of migration if you know what styles you really need and how deep your framework dependency goes.
How to deal with uncertainty in web development
The Tailwind CSS crisis of 2026 will leave a mark on how we view open source. When the ground shifts, even major projects with solid maintenance can fall apart. Learn Tailwind if you want—but don't let it replace actually understanding CSS. Be ready for things to change quickly, know how CSS works, and know what other options you have. This is a wake-up call for businesses to learn how to deal with risks and stay in business. Giving money to open source projects isn't being nice; it's giving your business the money it needs to build things.
The main question is: what does AI mean for the future of open source? How do libraries for machine learning make money? What kinds of business models work? Tailwind is just one example of a larger trend: technology is moving faster than anyone can plan for. Open source will continue, but only if developers work to find a balance between new ideas and stability. Whoever shows up gets to write what comes next.
