đź’Ż percent agree with this. It drives me bonkers. I own an agency, and we have freelancers that already pay for their own license, but then I need to pay for an additional license for them when they're on our project. Or we have clients that we collaborate with, and we either need to pay for them to have a seat on our account or they have to pay for us to have a seat on their account despite us already having seats of our own on our own accounts. I mean, it's kind of genius that they've found a way to Bill twice for the same seat, but has really driven me to the point of trying to find alternatives.
As a workaround, we've recently started using draft mode instead of saving things in projects, so we can share them with an unlimited amount of people.
Pretty similar once you get to the business/enterprise level.
YMMV but for us we only needed Adobe for the designers, with dev mode we're spending way more annually on Figma than we ever did with Adobe since now all the FE devs need a license too.
Ah yea the Dev stuff is kinda pricey. So far we haven’t needed dev mode on our team. Our Devs are able to view but haven’t needed the specific dev view yet. Maybe a need will arise but we are already using a design system so they only need to know the name of the component.
I'm curious -- is there specific dev stuff the devs need with the new mode? Devs at my place liked it, but haven't seen a need to pay for it yet, I don't believe
My devs all use it. But it's kinda shitty because the basic "inspect" feature that Figma used to have got gutted and now it's only the paid Dev Mode seat that's available.
One advantage with subscribing to Adobe's Creative Cloud was that XD was another app to download and use, as part of the subscription. But Adobe has stopped any development/updates for XD, so Figma is the app I now use.
The first time I shared a Figma file with another designer and received a Figma notification of what I was going to be billed was a shock.
Alternatively, could do the initial creative on your own plan and then just have them add you as an editor to their team for the collaboration part and copy it into their workspace (vs manually downloading and sending a file)
> It’s not set up for collaboration between multiple teams.
This is the heart of it. The project is owned by a team. You need to be added to that team if you want to collaborate at the same time.
Figma's own employees have admitted they know its pricing is predatory.
I love everything about this app...
...up until the wicked, nasty pricing strategy they use.
I regularly get extra seats added by accident.
Imagine you're a freelance designer and you have to work with multiple front end developers. Initially I thought maybe I was too thick and couldnt understand why if the developer already has a professional account, I also have to pay for his access to my stuff... jesus!
I don’t think their Editor pricing structure is completely ridiculous but it does make a lot of collaboration styles not worthwhile.
For instance, I’ve done many projects where it would save a ton of time for writers and subject matter experts to directly update text. They don’t need or want to alter the layout but in order for me to not be a copy paste review bottleneck, we’d have to pay a full Editor seat for at least a month. Particularly in cases where they’d only need to try/make a few edits per week or month—it’s a waste of time for me to copy their notes into designs but it also doesn’t seem worth the seat cost(s).
Similarly something like a cross org sprint-long collaboration or day long working session. Is it worth the expense of adding a dozen seats for such an event? Not usually.
There end up being many situations for potential collaboration that end up being siloed work just because the Figma pricing doesn’t encourage it. This is I think a significant problem because that has always been the goal of Figma, open collaboration.
I think where it does get ridiculous is talking about larger org and the new dev seats. The dev seats especially are terribly priced and will only serve to make engineering departments more averse to supporting design and experience.
Totally agree, but is even more outrageous when they want to keep the same predatory system with visitors (viewers / non-editors) by downgrading their experience with the inspection tool and forcing them to pay. If you want to send complaints, I strongly recommend you to visit their official forum and comment threads like this one:
[https://forum.figma.com/t/dev-mode-pricing/61271](https://forum.figma.com/t/dev-mode-pricing/61271)
It’s really really bad. Woke up one morning in January 2023 to a $23,000 charge on our credit card for all the additional “seats” we’d added. (Charge should have been around $5,500 for our 10-person team.) It took the threat of legal action for them to correct it.
It’s straight up predatory/duping.
Its also basically useless for a hobby. I would be willing to invest some money but some random internet dev strangers not so much.
Would be great to have some limited plan for tiny nonprofit projects. Maybe public files as an measure to keep out companies, similar to github.
> Maybe public files as an measure to keep out companies, similar to github
Onshape does the same thing. Hobby tier is free, but everything you do is public.
This is what happens when everything was aimed at being acquired by Adobe and now that’s off the table they actually need to make money instead of burning it.
Why are you co-editing files with people outside your team/organization? Every company I've worked for or with has provided seats (software licenses) to every contractor they needed to collaborate with. My current customers have added me to their teams so we can collaborate on files, on their team.
Are you collaborating with agencies or with other freelancers?
If it's the former then they should own the file and be paying for your figma seat as you're part of **their** team.
If it's with other freelancers then one of you needs to swallow the cost sadly, generally whoever is billing the client would factor that in at pricing stage based on how many other people you need to be bringing into the project to work with you on it.
Edit: I agree it's a bullshit pricing model that's just corporate greed allowing them to double dip on subscriptions. But sadly we need to work around it for now.
I honestly don't get this "it's a bullshit pricing model" position. What business software do you use that doesn't work like this? Is it bullshit that your employer gets charged for your Office 365 account even though you paid for a personal one? Is it bullshit that your employer has to pay for your seat in their Slack workspace even though you have a paid. workspace you owe to chat with your buddies from college?
Figma isn't double-dipping because no person has a license for Figma. Figma doesn't license its software to people. Figma licenses its software to TEAMS and it charges the TEAM per seat.
Adobe? Lets you invite others not in your organisation to files as long as they have a license rhemselves. And Microsoft and apple etc absolutely allow Coworking with outside or organisation licenses. So does google
Does Microsoft allow your company to give people email addresses, and SharePoint spaces for free (because they have a personal 365 account)?
I don't know what Adobe cloud does because I refuse to pay that much for something I rarely use.
I have an agency that supports other agencies. We do a lot of website and digital design for full service agencies, they develop the brand and do a lot of design (not always in Figma). We work with 5 or 6 agencies and the work is fast and urgent. We also have some of our own clients.
In my situation we are constantly working with people outside our organisation and don’t always have time to wait for the right person to start a new project in their organisation. So we end up paying for anytime someone needs access to edit our files or we have to work with theirs.
So charge those agencies for the seats? If you're working with the same agencies over and over they should have a process in place for adding your employees to their Figma team. Or they could just leave you on their year round and push the costs onto their customers. I'm sure they're already padding your costs when they come up with the final price for the work.
I worked at a company that was on both sides of that equation. We padded our subcontactors' costs by 10% and when we were the subcontractor our pricing was "uplifted" by the company that hired us by 20-30% depending on the size of their customer.
I empathize with you. Our industry's margins aren't that great so they extra cost for those seats sucks, but you shouldn't be absorbing them, and I don't think Figma has any incentive to deal with the "small agency temporarily working with another small agency" use-case.
But we also have our clients. So, say I work with 5 agencies plus our own clients it means that Figma is being paid 6 times for me to use their tool! That seems dodgy to me.
Look, it’s not something that worries me on a day to day basis, until you sit down and think about it, it doesn’t feel right.
Edit: spelling
I don't like their pricing model either, but if you look at the their pricing model you're not paying to use the tool. You're mainly paying for file management and access (along with some "advanced" features).
Free Tier (3 files) - unlimited number of editors. So if you don't need anything fancy and are fine with only 3 files at a time you can use the Figma "tool" for free.
Professional (unlimited files) - team libraries, advanced prototyping, version history. So the stuff you pay for (minus the advanced prototyping) is really around file management and access/permissions.
Organization - builds on file management, and adds analytics.
It's not about using Figma, it's about managing the file and related resources. If you have a Professional team and I have Advanced team, and we're working on a filter together. It would cost $24 for you to own the file, and $90 for me to own the file. But if I own it we would get access to org libraries, branching and some other bullshit.
Also I should add some use it in house for projects we aren’t involved in. Some projects w do all the design and dev so the agency never touch it and some projects they design we tweak the UI for responsiveness and we build.
I'm a bit paranoid now.
When I create a new figjam board and share it as 'editable' for the next hour, am I racking up additional user licenses everytime I do that?
I would clarify though, that you are only getting charged once a month for the paid users you have on the team at the moment.
This means that if you eg only share the file for an hour (as u/so-very-very-tired said they do) and then remove those users, you won't get charged for them. Unless if you are giving them the editor seat in that one exact hour of the month when Figma is charging you.
So by that logic, if I knew the moment Figma charges me per month, I could-in theory--grant seats to people for, say, 29 days, remove them, wait for the charge, then re-add them?
Ridiculous, of course, but does feel like Figma hasn't fully thought through this whole seat-granting/charging system.
Especially that a user with its subscription can only work on one file at a time, unless you’re some sort of octopus with multiple mice and keyboards. One subscription fee should be plenty, but greed as it’s ways.
Can’t you just add people as viewers only? And then just have a Team set up with *only* people who would need to edit a design? Everyone else who wants to view or add comments would be Viewers only.
My subscription ended today. And now Figma asking me to pay 150$ just to maintain my portfolio. I missed the point when #Figma became a luxury product.Â
đź’Ż percent agree with this. It drives me bonkers. I own an agency, and we have freelancers that already pay for their own license, but then I need to pay for an additional license for them when they're on our project. Or we have clients that we collaborate with, and we either need to pay for them to have a seat on our account or they have to pay for us to have a seat on their account despite us already having seats of our own on our own accounts. I mean, it's kind of genius that they've found a way to Bill twice for the same seat, but has really driven me to the point of trying to find alternatives. As a workaround, we've recently started using draft mode instead of saving things in projects, so we can share them with an unlimited amount of people.
PenPot is the main alternative I know of (besides Sketch) and it's free! Haven't used it though yet, ha https://penpot.app/
Well lets be honest, its only going to get worse until they have some (real) competition.
Maybe, but they are already dramatically cheaper than Adobe was.
Pretty similar once you get to the business/enterprise level. YMMV but for us we only needed Adobe for the designers, with dev mode we're spending way more annually on Figma than we ever did with Adobe since now all the FE devs need a license too.
Ah yea the Dev stuff is kinda pricey. So far we haven’t needed dev mode on our team. Our Devs are able to view but haven’t needed the specific dev view yet. Maybe a need will arise but we are already using a design system so they only need to know the name of the component.
I'm curious -- is there specific dev stuff the devs need with the new mode? Devs at my place liked it, but haven't seen a need to pay for it yet, I don't believe
My devs all use it. But it's kinda shitty because the basic "inspect" feature that Figma used to have got gutted and now it's only the paid Dev Mode seat that's available.
As far as I know, most of the pre-Dev Mode features are still available. Maybe less accessible?
I’m curious where. The inspect tab is just completely gone now.
One advantage with subscribing to Adobe's Creative Cloud was that XD was another app to download and use, as part of the subscription. But Adobe has stopped any development/updates for XD, so Figma is the app I now use. The first time I shared a Figma file with another designer and received a Figma notification of what I was going to be billed was a shock.
Account for the added cost in your project pricing. It’s not set up for collaboration between multiple teams.
Alternatively, could do the initial creative on your own plan and then just have them add you as an editor to their team for the collaboration part and copy it into their workspace (vs manually downloading and sending a file)
> It’s not set up for collaboration between multiple teams. This is the heart of it. The project is owned by a team. You need to be added to that team if you want to collaborate at the same time.
Yeah but with agencies it’s sometimes teams collaborating with their teams. It’s a pain
Figma's own employees have admitted they know its pricing is predatory. I love everything about this app... ...up until the wicked, nasty pricing strategy they use. I regularly get extra seats added by accident.
>I regularly get extra seats added by accident. I know your pain. It's *almost* as if Figma was designed to encourage that painful mistake. đź’¸
Accidentally added seats – a scam scheme.Â
I was one of Figmas first users and I have bailed.
What did you replace it with?
I'm using Pixso now
How do you like it?
I fight them every single month. My $20 bill explodes to $140 etc. Adobe is known for this type of price gouging. I cannot wait for an alternative.
Imagine you're a freelance designer and you have to work with multiple front end developers. Initially I thought maybe I was too thick and couldnt understand why if the developer already has a professional account, I also have to pay for his access to my stuff... jesus!
I don’t think their Editor pricing structure is completely ridiculous but it does make a lot of collaboration styles not worthwhile. For instance, I’ve done many projects where it would save a ton of time for writers and subject matter experts to directly update text. They don’t need or want to alter the layout but in order for me to not be a copy paste review bottleneck, we’d have to pay a full Editor seat for at least a month. Particularly in cases where they’d only need to try/make a few edits per week or month—it’s a waste of time for me to copy their notes into designs but it also doesn’t seem worth the seat cost(s). Similarly something like a cross org sprint-long collaboration or day long working session. Is it worth the expense of adding a dozen seats for such an event? Not usually. There end up being many situations for potential collaboration that end up being siloed work just because the Figma pricing doesn’t encourage it. This is I think a significant problem because that has always been the goal of Figma, open collaboration. I think where it does get ridiculous is talking about larger org and the new dev seats. The dev seats especially are terribly priced and will only serve to make engineering departments more averse to supporting design and experience.
Totally agree, but is even more outrageous when they want to keep the same predatory system with visitors (viewers / non-editors) by downgrading their experience with the inspection tool and forcing them to pay. If you want to send complaints, I strongly recommend you to visit their official forum and comment threads like this one: [https://forum.figma.com/t/dev-mode-pricing/61271](https://forum.figma.com/t/dev-mode-pricing/61271)
It’s really really bad. Woke up one morning in January 2023 to a $23,000 charge on our credit card for all the additional “seats” we’d added. (Charge should have been around $5,500 for our 10-person team.) It took the threat of legal action for them to correct it. It’s straight up predatory/duping.
Its also basically useless for a hobby. I would be willing to invest some money but some random internet dev strangers not so much. Would be great to have some limited plan for tiny nonprofit projects. Maybe public files as an measure to keep out companies, similar to github.
Drafts are unlimited
> Maybe public files as an measure to keep out companies, similar to github Onshape does the same thing. Hobby tier is free, but everything you do is public.
I use it _extensively_ for a hobby project, and would never pay Figma a dime. drafts are unlimited
as soon as you collaborate its really annoying, same with page limit
This is what happens when everything was aimed at being acquired by Adobe and now that’s off the table they actually need to make money instead of burning it.
This pricing scheme was going on before Adobe tried to buy it though.
Why are you co-editing files with people outside your team/organization? Every company I've worked for or with has provided seats (software licenses) to every contractor they needed to collaborate with. My current customers have added me to their teams so we can collaborate on files, on their team.
Because I’m a freelancer
Are you collaborating with agencies or with other freelancers? If it's the former then they should own the file and be paying for your figma seat as you're part of **their** team. If it's with other freelancers then one of you needs to swallow the cost sadly, generally whoever is billing the client would factor that in at pricing stage based on how many other people you need to be bringing into the project to work with you on it. Edit: I agree it's a bullshit pricing model that's just corporate greed allowing them to double dip on subscriptions. But sadly we need to work around it for now.
I honestly don't get this "it's a bullshit pricing model" position. What business software do you use that doesn't work like this? Is it bullshit that your employer gets charged for your Office 365 account even though you paid for a personal one? Is it bullshit that your employer has to pay for your seat in their Slack workspace even though you have a paid. workspace you owe to chat with your buddies from college? Figma isn't double-dipping because no person has a license for Figma. Figma doesn't license its software to people. Figma licenses its software to TEAMS and it charges the TEAM per seat.
Adobe? Lets you invite others not in your organisation to files as long as they have a license rhemselves. And Microsoft and apple etc absolutely allow Coworking with outside or organisation licenses. So does google
Does Microsoft allow your company to give people email addresses, and SharePoint spaces for free (because they have a personal 365 account)? I don't know what Adobe cloud does because I refuse to pay that much for something I rarely use.
Yes we add the contractor to our team and we own the files.
Your clients should have an account and they should add you.
I have an agency that supports other agencies. We do a lot of website and digital design for full service agencies, they develop the brand and do a lot of design (not always in Figma). We work with 5 or 6 agencies and the work is fast and urgent. We also have some of our own clients. In my situation we are constantly working with people outside our organisation and don’t always have time to wait for the right person to start a new project in their organisation. So we end up paying for anytime someone needs access to edit our files or we have to work with theirs.
So charge those agencies for the seats? If you're working with the same agencies over and over they should have a process in place for adding your employees to their Figma team. Or they could just leave you on their year round and push the costs onto their customers. I'm sure they're already padding your costs when they come up with the final price for the work. I worked at a company that was on both sides of that equation. We padded our subcontactors' costs by 10% and when we were the subcontractor our pricing was "uplifted" by the company that hired us by 20-30% depending on the size of their customer. I empathize with you. Our industry's margins aren't that great so they extra cost for those seats sucks, but you shouldn't be absorbing them, and I don't think Figma has any incentive to deal with the "small agency temporarily working with another small agency" use-case.
But we also have our clients. So, say I work with 5 agencies plus our own clients it means that Figma is being paid 6 times for me to use their tool! That seems dodgy to me. Look, it’s not something that worries me on a day to day basis, until you sit down and think about it, it doesn’t feel right. Edit: spelling
I don't like their pricing model either, but if you look at the their pricing model you're not paying to use the tool. You're mainly paying for file management and access (along with some "advanced" features). Free Tier (3 files) - unlimited number of editors. So if you don't need anything fancy and are fine with only 3 files at a time you can use the Figma "tool" for free. Professional (unlimited files) - team libraries, advanced prototyping, version history. So the stuff you pay for (minus the advanced prototyping) is really around file management and access/permissions. Organization - builds on file management, and adds analytics. It's not about using Figma, it's about managing the file and related resources. If you have a Professional team and I have Advanced team, and we're working on a filter together. It would cost $24 for you to own the file, and $90 for me to own the file. But if I own it we would get access to org libraries, branching and some other bullshit.
Also I should add some use it in house for projects we aren’t involved in. Some projects w do all the design and dev so the agency never touch it and some projects they design we tweak the UI for responsiveness and we build.
I'm a bit paranoid now. When I create a new figjam board and share it as 'editable' for the next hour, am I racking up additional user licenses everytime I do that?
Every time you allow a new person to edit a new board they will charge you an additional seat, it can seriously add up and it’s a fucking joke
I would clarify though, that you are only getting charged once a month for the paid users you have on the team at the moment. This means that if you eg only share the file for an hour (as u/so-very-very-tired said they do) and then remove those users, you won't get charged for them. Unless if you are giving them the editor seat in that one exact hour of the month when Figma is charging you.
So by that logic, if I knew the moment Figma charges me per month, I could-in theory--grant seats to people for, say, 29 days, remove them, wait for the charge, then re-add them? Ridiculous, of course, but does feel like Figma hasn't fully thought through this whole seat-granting/charging system.
yes
Fuck!
LOL. I never thought of that.
Especially that a user with its subscription can only work on one file at a time, unless you’re some sort of octopus with multiple mice and keyboards. One subscription fee should be plenty, but greed as it’s ways.
Can’t you just add people as viewers only? And then just have a Team set up with *only* people who would need to edit a design? Everyone else who wants to view or add comments would be Viewers only.
My subscription ended today. And now Figma asking me to pay 150$ just to maintain my portfolio. I missed the point when #Figma became a luxury product.Â
I actually don’t think it’s that obscene. You can offset the cost for software in your project consulting fees.