Tailwind CSS, hailed as the most popular utility-first CSS framework in modern web development, is facing an unprecedented survival crisis. Despite its usage reaching an all-time high, it has suffered a sharp decline in documentation traffic and a collapse of its paid conversion channels due to the rise of AI tools, leading to an 80% drop in company revenue. Founder Adam Wathan had to reluctantly lay off 75% of the engineering team.

Surge in Usage vs. Revenue Collapse  

Tailwind CSS currently has a monthly download volume of 75 million. According to the 2025 State of CSS survey, its adoption rate among developers has reached 51%, making it the most popular CSS framework in history. Almost all mainstream AI coding tools (such as Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) prioritize using Tailwind CSS class names and patterns when generating frontend code.  

However, ironically, this "AI-native friendliness" led to the collapse of its business model. Tailwind Labs originally relied on documentation page traffic to guide users to discover and purchase its paid products, such as Tailwind UI (component libraries). Now, developers can ask large models "write a modern card component with Tailwind" and get complete code instantly without visiting the official website. As a result: since early 2023, Tailwind's documentation traffic has dropped by about 40%, and paid conversion opportunities have significantly evaporated, with overall revenue plummeting nearly 80% year-over-year.

The Harsh Reality Behind the Layoffs  

On January 6, 2026, Tailwind Labs cut 75% of its engineering team (from 4 people down to just one), and now the company is operated by only three co-founders, one engineer, and one part-time employee. Founder Adam Wathan wrote in a GitHub comment: "This is a direct consequence of AI's harsh impact on our business." He further revealed in his personal podcast that income forecasts during the holiday period showed that if immediate action was not taken, the company would be unable to pay salaries within six months.  

This event sparked heated discussions in communities like Hacker News, with over 1,100 likes and hundreds of comments. Many developers lamented: "The more popular an open-source project becomes, the harder it is to sustain."

Community and Industry Response: A Wave of Donations  

After the incident was exposed, the developer community quickly took action, with several tech companies announcing sponsorships for Tailwind Labs to show support:  

- Vercel was the first to officially become a sponsor, with CEO Guillermo Rauch stating that Tailwind has become "the foundation of the Web."  

- Supabase, Gumroad, Lovable, and other companies also joined the sponsorship list.  

- The Google AI team announced a donation to Tailwind, seen as one of the most proactive responses.  

Currently, OpenAI and Anthropic have not publicly commented or announced similar donations, but the community generally believes that as the two largest model manufacturers that rely most on Tailwind to generate code, they have a responsibility to support this critical open-source infrastructure.

A Warning About Open Source Sustainability in the AI Era  

Tailwind CSS's dilemma is not an isolated case; it reveals a profound contradiction in the AI era: while large models greatly enhance development efficiency, they also cut off traditional open-source projects' monetization paths—document traffic and paid conversions.  

Many voices are calling for a more equitable distribution mechanism, such as AI companies returning a portion of their revenue to key open-source projects based on usage, or exploring new sponsorship/subscription models to avoid more popular open-source projects becoming "abandoned and unmaintained."