I completely agree—viewers must be able to see annotations. If this isn't a bug, then it's an extremely short-sighted decision, possibly a misguided attempt at monetization.

As someone working for a SaaS company, most of my viewers are internal stakeholders—sales teams, product managers, and executives—none of whom are developers. Expecting them to become developers just to fully understand a project is absurd. And for those working with external clients, this issue is even more frustrating. Under the current setup, you'd have to grant a client developer access just so they can see project annotations, which makes no sense.

While component-based annotations and comments provide a workaround, they are a poor substitute. This approach is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t result in additional charges just to let people see how something is supposed to function. Restricting annotation creation to full and developer subscriptions is understandable, but limiting visibility for viewers? That’s a serious misstep that results in a frustrating and inefficient experience for Figma users.

We have the exact same problem! Our PM is not able to see annotations, which is crucial as that’s where we add some of the specifications of the design.

Upvoting this, Annotations are great for anyone involved in a project, not solely internal designers or devs.

The labor cost is massive when manually crafting, positioning, and categorizing annotations because the built in annotations are locked to most users.

We can't justify Dev Mode licenses for every person who needs to see the necessary annotations attached to all our designs.

This is the biggest disappointment that Figma has shipped thus far.