Licensing question

It is my experience that Figma will now charge you for every user you add to one of your projects, regardless of whether or not they have their own license. It’s pretty expensive for freelancers who may already have their own licenses but not have a parent organization to put the files/payments under. Also feels like Figma is double-dipping.

I’m trying to figure this out as well.

From the research I have done, there appears to be two types of “seats”: 1) “view only” and 2) “editor”. Editor access is where Figma charges the account. If you share a file/project with someone and give them “editor” access, you will be changed for that “seat” regardless if that person you shared the file with already has their own paid Figma account. View access appears to be free.

This is the response I got from Figma support –

“The Professional plan is billed per editor role. As long as those 10 users are given the viewer or viewer restricted role, they will not be included in your team’s billing.”

I’ve discovered this issue recently too and to be honest I find it to be a really unfair billing structure for the creative industry. It’s definitely double-dipping.

I’m a freelance web designer/developer and work with a lot of other designers/creative agencies. This poses the constant need to collaborate on files, which then means one of two things: they either have the extra expense of giving me access to the file, or I do. This is EXTREMELY difficult to predict and expense for, considering some projects span over a few months.

I think Figma really needs to re-think this billing structure if they want to keep positioning themselves as a collaborative platform. Designers will just stop sharing files with each other and create PDFs or equivalent instead, which will only get messy and inconvenient.

I’m dealing with this now as well. They are 100% double dipping. I’m on a yearly subscription for my agency and every single time we send a file to collaborate with anyone, contractors, outsourced dev shops, etc - we get hit with a massive yearly seat bill.

I contacted support and they just smiled and said this is how it is.

The only work around is to remove their seat just before the “true-up” period (I’m in organization mode with annual billing) and then just add them again after the period so they get another 3 months unpaid. It’s annoying to do but keeps your money out of their dishonest hands.

After they rug pulled my 20 person dev team back in January and forced us to pay $25/mo for every one of their seats, this is the least I can do.