Can a file be edited by an account from another team without charging the owner team?

Figma is really dropping the ball with their billing scheme. I guess using shady patterns leads to more revenue, regardless user satisfaction.

Reddit also has lots of discussions about this topic:

Boys, cmon. These lads at Figma are full of bull****. They are paying for using Amazon AWS or Firebase as their servers and can’t change their pricing. They will never do something like Miro where you can invite guest editors. Switch to XD or Lunacy. And stop paying their strip club visits.

So happy these scum*** were acquired by Adobe.

I am also majorly struggling with this in two different scenarios:

1. I am a freelance creative director for a company and I’m working to convince the client to move all projects to Figma under one team. Currently there are several freelance designers working on projects for the brand in their independent spaces (an email designer, a social designer, a marketing designer). So now to bring us together, the client does not understand why he has to pay for them to be editors while they are already paying for their own professional accounts to do the same work. This is the one hurdle to getting the client on board. Incredibly frustrating…

2. Separate from my own freelance practice, I am getting a small studio off the ground with two friends. We already individually pay for figma, so it seems so silly to have to pay again to set up a space for us to use for the studio.

Its ridiculous that for me to use Figma, i would need three separate editor licenses (my personal freelance practice, as a creative director within the company’s figma, and with my studio)

Please consider the actual people using your product!!!

I voiced this concern many times over the years, with many others, and yet it never changed. This is a dark pattern, one that should not exist.
Figma is a great product until you go into sharing rights.
So a free account can have 2 edit seats but a paid one cannot? Why paying customers need to pay again to access files from another org? it’s bonkers.
I too have been touched by the grace of the Secret Bill landing a month after i gave access people already paying for Figma, while i’m also a yearly paying custmer.
Bad bad bad practice.

Adding another voice to the mix - the dark pattern is to force each company with a Figma “team” to pay for every single user that can edit it’s files.

When you invite someone to a file as an “editor” or add the setting “Anyone with the link” can edit, you will pay for any user accessing your file - unless you make their permissions “can view” or “can view prototypes”. But that doesn’t stop them from joining another file as an editor, and therefore being a charged seat on your account.

The presumed behavior for “Anyone can edit the file” is that anyone with the software can edit the file, no extra charges. Large companies pay for the privilege of having seats for their designers, who might also pay for their own accounts. The benefit to the large company is they can de-provision users quickly and keep their files secure. Small companies cannot afford this privilege.

I can confirm there is no clear documentation around this - and when I wrote Figma frustrated that I kept being charged they refunded me for my complaints, but didn’t clearly explain the behavior, only that they couldn’t keep refunding.

It’s infuriating. We expect software to be “polite” or “courteous” - and when it’s not, our perception is deeply affected. In this case, the behavior is akin to a scam artist or con-man, and I will look for an opportunity to move back to Sketch, for this reason alone.

I’m a new-ish user to Figma, and a freelancer. (Used other prototyping tools for years). I was very suprised to learn that my clients are paying for an editor seat while collaborating with me… I can’t add anything new to the discussion, but I’m curious if anyone can answer: how long has this been Figma’s billing practice?

I wish Figma introduce the same system as Slack Connect.
Paying teams can share their projects as editors would solve the problem.

im confused, why give them editors rights if they’re a client? give them viewing rights, they can tell you the changes they need and you can make them and bill them. but yeah Figma is doing the dodgey on this one

They can be clients but also have designers in-house, which will most likely lead to collaborating on the same file

This is definitely something, if resolved, that would make me migrate fully to Figma from Sketch