[hdra]

i remember listening to Adam in one of the podcast he was in (I think it was either the Hackers Inc, or the Art of Product, but could've been something else where he was a guest) - and I remember that he mentioned that idea that there are always a new wave of new developers that they can sell the product to.

I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.

But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.

Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.

[shunia_huang]

I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.

I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.