Hi ​@Jeff_Allison, thanks for reaching out! 

Connected projects seems like the best solution for you. 

Connected projects lets two separate teams—like your freelancers —work together in a shared project using billable seats from their own plans. This makes it easy to collaborate without paying for extra full seats. As the host, you’ll also have more control over the settings and permissions of the project.

You can learn more about connecting a project to an external team here.

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately, this doesn’t solve the issue, because the freelancers we work with are independent contractors who don’t have their own Figma team plans. We need to be able to do this by adding them to our plan—which we were able to do before Figma restructured plans and permissions.

Thanks for clarifying, ​@Jeff_Allison! 

To clarify how sharing works, you can invite users to just a specific file. 

At the file level, if you invite someone to a specific file,  but not to the team, they will only have access to that file.
Alternatively, if you invite someone to a team, they would have access to all projects and files within that team.

I’m able to invite an external user to view a specific file, but when I invite a user to edit a specific file, they inherit our team-level permissions, which allow users to view all files. In the previous incarnation of Figma, I was able to invite users to edit specific files without giving them team-level permissions. Unless I’m missing something.

By default, files inherit access and permission levels from their parent (project or team). This means that a file will inherit the permissions set on the project level, and a project will inherit permissions set on the team level.

To work around this, you can change the access and permissions level on any resource. Permissions set on a file level will override any inherited permissions from the parent resources—which means permissions set on a file will override permissions set on a project, and so on. Permissions given to users individually invited to files will override organization or project permissions set on the file level.

You can learn more about inherited access and permissions in our Help Center article here.

Thanks for the info. I understand how Figma permissions work. The issue is that we used to be able to grant (paid) edit access to a freelancer on a single file or project without letting them join our team, which by default gives them view access to all our projects.

I’m stunned that Figma made this change. It’s a serious design flaw that makes it impossible to collaborate with users outside our organization unless they have a Professional or higher-level plan. This locks out most of the freelancers we work with.

Been doing a bit more research on this. Looks like Figma has taken this permission control away from Professional plans but still allows it on Organization and Enterprise plans. Pretty weasely move. 

Joining to this request. Thank you ​@Jeff_Allison for the thread starting.

Now the sharing is very poorly done. 
1. I want to provide an edit mode to the user JUST in 1 file. 
2. I am ready to pay for him as for the full editor seat.
The same is about the devmode seats. Now I am very frustrated how it’s impossible to do easily

​@Nick_Zhurenko After many posts here, about half a dozen emails to Figma support, a one-on-one call with a Figma rep, and different answers from everyone, I’ve finally determined that it is, in fact, possible to invite invite a user to edit a single file without allowing them to view all your files. I’ve have tested this on my end by inviting a coworker (using her personal email) to edit a file. She was not able to view any file except for the one she was invited to.

It’s extremely frustrating and disappointing that it has taken this much effort just to get an answer to such a simple question. My guess is that Figma’s policy moving forward is to to let Professional users fend for ourselves as a way to get us to upgrade to their Organization plan, which is 4X the cost of the Pro plan. The rep I spoke with said they consider the Professional plan a “personal” plan, even though that’s not at all how they bill it on their website. It’s very misleading.

Again, extremely disappointing.