Has there been any consideration to changing how API rate limits are applied? Here is our situation, which seems like a pretty common one:
We are a software dev shop. We have a Figma Professional Plan for our organization, Full seat licenses for our developers. We rely heavily on the Figma API for connecting our tooling (AI coding tools, etc) and pulling directly from Figma files. The rate limits are perfectly sufficient for how we usually work with one HUGE caveat…
We work with a design shop outside our company. They have their own Figma org, Pro Plan, and Full seat licenses. Projects usually start with them creating Figma designs. They share these files with us, but they live in their org. If we access the files directly, we hit API rate limits almost immediately because we only have guest access to these files.
The main work-around we have now is to make a copy of the Figma file into our org. Then we can access it with the API limits under our licenses. But this defeats the entire purpose and flow for iterative collaboration. Designs are updated as we do development. There is back and forth. Having a single source of truth with version and comment history is really important. We lose that by making copies all the time.
Connected projects (https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/30124855491863-Guide-to-connected-projects) don’t work. The limit for Pro plans is 3. Even for Enterprise plans, the limit is 15. We do many projects per year with this design shop with several active at any given time. They do plenty of other projects for other clients. Connected projects as they are currently implemented would not work - we’d have to create a single connected project file and shove all of our projects into that - it would get huge and unwieldy.
If we moved the Figma files into our org, that would solve the rate limit issue for us, but would handcuff the design firm to guest access - they wouldn’t be able to use the features of their full licenses.
Both firms are happy to pay for our own licenses and the features that come with them. But it seems like the only current solution is to pay for duplicate licenses - either on their side or ours. I’m sure that’s great from Figma’s perspective (yay, double dipping on licenses!), but it’s absolutely awful for us as customers.
We would love if there was a better fit for our working model.