145: Statamic 3.0 and Tailwind CSS 2.0

What It Covers

Adam Wathan and Jack McDade discuss Statamic 3.0's imminent launch after two years of development, introducing a new pricing model at $259 plus $59 annual renewals with a free tier. They explore Tailwind CSS 2.0 planning, including new color palettes, dark mode variants, and solving the @apply directive's CSS source order challenges for a November 16 target release.

Key Questions Answered

• •Pricing model transition: Statamic shifts from $199 one-time to $259 plus $59 annual support, adding a free tier for solo developers limited to one superuser, no permissions, no revisions. This targets sophisticated customers needing team features while expanding audience reach. The price increase and recurring revenue offset potential free-tier cannibalization, with most paying customers requiring multi-user capabilities for client work.
• •Feature-flagged breaking changes: Tailwind 2.0 introduces breaking changes gradually through feature flags in minor releases before the major version ships. Users receive warnings to opt into new behaviors incrementally, ensuring smooth migration when 2.0 launches. This approach prioritizes actual upgradeability over ceremonial version bumps, contrasting with frameworks like Bootstrap where major versions require complete rewrites rather than incremental updates.
• •Color palette architecture: Tailwind 2.0 exports modular color palettes as separate npm packages, allowing developers to mix multiple blues, pinks, and grays by importing specific shades. Steve designs 10-shade palettes based on real UI needs rather than mathematical distribution, ensuring each shade serves practical purposes. Pre-configured palette combinations with names replace the current single-option-per-color limitation, reducing visual homogeneity across Tailwind sites.
• •CSS @apply complexity: The @apply directive must resolve whether to respect CSS source order or declaration order when extracting utilities. Hover and focus variants create additional complexity because they generate separate rules, forcing padding declarations to move after them to maintain proper specificity. This affects whether extracted classes behave identically to their HTML counterparts, requiring careful consideration of developer expectations versus technical constraints.
• •Sustainable development cycles: Hiring three employees (Brad Korns for IntelliSense, Simon Vrachlotis for async component work, Robin for JavaScript libraries) enables parallel workstreams on Tailwind UI, headless UI components, and documentation. The team structures roles around timezone constraints, with Australia-based Simon handling design-to-HTML conversion overnight. This distribution prevents founder bottlenecks on tactical implementation while maintaining strategic direction on complex architectural decisions.
• •Dark mode implementation strategy: Tailwind 2.0 adds official dark mode variants enabling syntax like "bg-white dark:bg-black" triggered by media queries or HTML class selectors. This feature ships alongside the new color palette as the primary user-facing additions in a deliberately incremental major version. The approach prioritizes backward compatibility and actual upgradeability over feature quantity, positioning Tailwind as the first CSS framework where version migrations are expected rather than avoided.