Vanilla JavaScript support for Tailwind Plus

This is a exciting use-case for custom elements, and probably how tailwind should have been implemented from the start, but it’s hilariously a paid feature?! (https://tailwindcss.com/plus#pricing) Intuitively, I’d expect the custom elements to be free and the framework integrations to cost money.

Tailwind Plus is a paid collection of UI components and templates.

TailwindCSS itself is meant to be nothing more than a styling tool, like Bootstrap...

The title of the blog post mentions Tailwind Plus so I’m assuming it’s a paid feature. The ambiguity is probably intentional.

It's not very expensive, all things considered. $299 for a single-user perpetual license (includes all future updates too) or about $1k for a team license[1].

If it saves you a bunch of time writing and maintaining the sort of components they are showing off, probably worth it?

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/plus#pricing

Yeah this seems like an odd thing to paywall. In the web dev world where everything is free, it's a pretty crazy ask to ask people to tie themselves to a UI framework where I guess you're forever paying a subscription just to continue using the framework?

It's like putting if postgres expected you to pay them a monthly fee.

edit: I see now their pricing is one-time perpetual access. Still, I'm genuinely curious how well this model works.

> I guess you're forever paying a subscription just to continue using the framework

It's a one-time fee for unlimited use and lifetime updates, not a subscription.

Another hilariously paid feature is https://sso.tax/

It's funny because they're unintuitive to their end users. However, that is deliberate - they are looking for a decision point that comes after, but not too long after, devs have heavily invested in the product.

Listen, I’m not against the Tailwind team getting their bag – they worked hard and created an amazing open source library. I just don’t think it’s in the interest of either users or maintainers to put vanilla JavaScript support behind a paywall.

Edit: apparently all framework integrations and the whole library and functionality is behind the same paywall? And regular tailwind is just the css classes/build process that I used to know? Do people not understand how casual readers might be confused about all this?

The entire component library is behind a paywall...are you saying they should be giving away the vanilla JS version?

You can use vanilla tailwind with vanilla JavaScript

ChatGPT can just steal it for me!

Yeah I strongly emphasise with them getting their money - the only problem with headless components being behind a paid license is that you cannot build a design system on top of them and open source it.

Bootstrap has javascript components.

Thanks! It's a paid feature because we just spent around $250,000 developing the library. Couldn't have built it if we were just going to give it away and maintain it forever for free, our engineers are talented people and deservingly well-paid.

different business models. bootstrap was made by twitter which was making money in it's way. while tailwind their monetary model is selling components.

for me the only thing I wish bootstrap had was the money color options tailwind has e.g bg-indigo-400 etc