Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central.
If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?
Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.
The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.
It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.
shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.
As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.
I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.
It is for many problems, especially concurrency related ones, much less powerful than trace points. But the issue I have seen is that some tools like gdb have unergonomic support for tracing so there I tend to use break points or printf debugging just because the tracing support is so bad in gdb.
Chrome probably has the benefit of being updated frequently rather than more of an annual cycle. But Safari still isn't anywhere near IE6 levels of awfulness.
WebKit also isn’t trying to push a proprietary OS-locked runtime for interactivity, doesn’t wildly diverge in most rendering behavior, and handles most basics correctly.
As much as IE6 was a menace for not keeping up with standards, what made it really bad was crap like ActiveX, radially different layout/rendering behaviors, and shortcomings like inability to render transparency in PNGs and some of the most illegible italic text rendering I’ve ever seen.
I think the problem is it's too risky to utilise a "new" database today that isn't available as a managed option on many platforms.
Neon is just Postgres for the most part -- sure if they shut down it'd be a pain to migrate but you'd mostly be fine just swapping to AWS RDS/Aurora or the plethora of other Postgres providers.
Buying into things like Gel or now defunct RethinkDB mean if the primary company went under you're stuck with a dead DB engine and potentially no managed hosting options.
I mean sorta? It's value add over something like Aurora or RDS has been it's SDL and EdgeQL layer which makes it a hard pill to swallow not knowing if it's going to go under and you're stuck trying to maintain that yourself or migrate off of it.
Less than two months for any production users to migrate. Sounds like they've basically got no paying customers otherwise I'd expect to have seen a longer than 2 month period to migrate especially over the holiday season.
I don't know what a Tailwind V5 could add that is "breaking" and be worth the migration headache again.
reply