Pouya Saadeghi

Pouya Saadeghi is an Istanbul-based UI designer and front-end developer best known as the creator of daisyUI, the free and open-source component library for Tailwind CSS. He maintains it independently and funds the work through GitHub Sponsors and paid templates, Figma kits and tools sold from the daisyUI store.

Saadeghi has been building websites since around 2009. According to his resume he studied software engineering in Rasht, Iran, ran a small design studio called Pasargad Graphic, co-founded the web tool Atbox.io and worked as a product designer and front-end developer for several startups and agencies, including ManaSky in Istanbul. He describes CSS as his favorite part of web development from the start.

daisyUI grew out of his own frustration. Tailwind CSS gave him full control, but he kept copying the same long lists of utility classes into every project. He bundled his reusable component classes into a plugin, so a button could just be a btn class that is still customizable with Tailwind utilities, and published it in November 2020 under the name daisyUI. Version 1.0 shipped in May 2021, followed by 2.0 in 2022, 3.0 and 4.0 in 2023 and daisyUI 5 for Tailwind CSS 4 in February 2025.

The library now has about 42,000 GitHub stars and more than four million npm downloads a month, and it ships dozens of components and themes. His resume says it is used in over 350,000 open-source projects. Around it, Saadeghi sells dashboard and landing-page templates such as Nexus, an official daisyUI Figma library and Blueprint, a daisyUI MCP server that helps AI coding agents generate UI code. Payments platform Creem has published a case study on how he moved daisyUI's store from Lemon Squeezy to Creem for its built-in revenue splits with collaborators.

Saadeghi is a clear example of a single designer-developer turning a popular open-source library into a sustainable business through sponsorships and premium add-ons rather than a paid core.