Design to dev handoff process? (NOT dev mode)

We’ve been working on tooling, process, and in-house plugins to facilitate this process but inevitably I’m still advocating for more dev mode seats. In fact, we’re experimenting with just giving a single dev a full design seat rather than a whole team getting dev mode.

There’s a reason they charge for it… dev mode is hands-down the best way to accomplish dev-design handoff. However, I think they charge waaayy too much. A typical team might have a 5-1 dev/designer ratio and paying nearly half the cost of a full seat for each dev is a really hard sell.

Figma, if you’re listening, I think your profit-maximizing price is somewhere around 10% the cost of a full seat. Then it would be an easy value proposition and the standard practice for all teams. It would build a bit of a moat by ensuring Figma remains the golden standard. As it stands, everyone is looking for alternatives because you’ve priced most teams out of a decent handoff experience.

Yes, we are going to have to build in-house plugins because we also cannot use 3rd party plugins due to security.

I have more like 20 developers to 1 designer situation happening and rotating contract developers.

It’s also not the best mode. Zeplin has way more features and is designed with developers in mind first. There’s a ton missing from Figma dev mode for what they are charging.