I’ve been working on a relatively uncomplicated web project in Figma Make for 10 weeks now. For the first two months, my monthly full-dev seat supplied all the AI credits I needed for the heavy lifting of scoping and building the site out (across more than a couple design iterations).
Coinciding with a 8-10 man-hour nightmare where Figma and Supabase would not connect, and the Figma AI could not figure out any solution until I fed it enough “What if’s...” that I got to the right workaround), in the last 3-4 weeks Figma Make has been burning through AI credits like a drunken sailor.
For the first two months, my Figma full-dev seat spend was $20/month...and that included four or five demo projects I did to kick the tires and see what Make could do.
This month? My projected Figma invoice is going to be $286.00.
Having worked as a developer in the Valley for some time, I understand that companies selling AI services are underpricing those services in order to gain market share during a boom-time growth explosion.
What I don’t understand is why Figma is willing to sacrifice a substantial portion of their user base by:
- Not offering us cost stability;
- Promoting hesitation to use Make due to zero cost predictability;
- Failing to communicate in advance and with full transparency if Figma is indeed jacking up the AI credit cost per prompt. We should be able to access an AI credit price list, showing the AI credit cost (or cost range) for a variety of common tasks within Make.
- Not offering an ‘AI Credit Fuel Gauge’ within the Figma UI, rather than giving us a single ‘low credits’ warning or having a task cut off in progress with a “You’re out of AI credits for your Full seat...Credits reset [DATE]”.
With an AI Credit Fuel Gauge and AI Credit Price List, if the project we’re working on isn’t a revenue job or there’s no budget to buy additional AI credits, seeing a readout in the UI showing we’re at 50% of our AI credit balance would allow us to consult the price list and decide what we can get done with the AI credits available in Figma Make.
Otherwise, Figma Make is not a viable product for anything other than the few projects with unlimited budgets.
My Figma Make spend went from $20 to $20 to $288 over 90 days. Nothing I’ve read in this forum or on Figma Make Help reassures me that my fourth month Figma Make bill won’t be $500, or my sixth month bill could break $1,000.
- Code is portable.
- Figma Make isn’t the only product on the shelf.
I hope a BDM in the executive ranks at Figma can do the math on that.