I have a paid professional account and my partner has another one but we can't work together

Hi ​@Damian Napolitano - I apologize if the billing system has caused unexpected charges on your end.

First, it was never our intention to cause this kind of issue. When we made changes to our billing system earlier this year, we created documentation on our help site to help people navigate through it.

However, I do understand that at the end of the day, there is still work we can do on our end to improve the overall understanding. Your feedback is valid and appreciated; it helps us understand different perceptions, so we can make adjustments as we move into the future. I’ll make sure to pass your thoughts on this internally.

With that said, I do want to make sure that any charges you received are reviewed by support, so that any potential refunds, cancellations, etc. can be processed.

I will follow up with you via PM. Thank you for your patience.

I have a paid Professional plan and my partner has another Professional plan. The thing is that we cannot collaborate in a same file. If I want to do that I have to paid another seat for her inside my team which is ridiculous because she is already paying for Figma.

You actually can do this without paying extra → Guide to connected projects

I totally get your frustration — the billing model for Figma teams can be confusing, especially when both of you already have Professional accounts. It’s really unfortunate that the UI doesn’t clearly warn about adding extra seats.

Sadly, Figma treats collaboration inside a single team differently than personal paid accounts, so even if your partner has a Professional plan, adding them to your team triggers another seat charge. It’s not ideal, and many users have run into the same issue.

For now, some people work around it by using shared files via links or creating a joint team with a single paid seat for small collaborations, though it’s not perfect. Hopefully Figma improves the UX and clarifies charges — it’s definitely a pain point for users who just want to collaborate.

This seat thing is a disaster. Why can I not have a collaborator who pays for Figma edit my file when we don't share a subscription. This model is awful for collaboration.  

You should not charge per seat when two people have a subscription to Figma.

Thank you very much for bringing this up!

This feature not only needed to be much less obscure, but the support should have addressed it in her answer.

I’m on the Education plan, and collaborating with people who have different subscriptions has become extremely frustrating. Collaboration simply isn’t working anymore. Even though everyone has verified their student status, they’re still unable to edit files. This is seriously hurting our productivity.

I’m honestly disappointed with some of the recent changes Figma has made. I really hope these issues get fixed soon, otherwise we’ll have no choice but to start looking for another tool!

Hey ​@Tajkia_Sharmi, thanks for sharing this, and I'm sorry to hear how disruptive this has been for your team. 

To provide some context, Figma plans are team-specific rather than account-wide. This means editing permissions depend on the plan of the team where the file is located:

• Education plan teams: Only users who have verified their education status can edit files.

• Professional plan teams: Only users with a paid Full seat on that team can edit files.

Because of this structure, it isn’t possible to mix paid Professional seats and free Education seats within the same team for editing access. When collaborators are on different plan types, it can lead to the editing restrictions you're seeing.

If you need to collaborate with users who are on different plans, a couple of options that may help are:

• Moving the files to your Drafts so collaborators can access them there.

• Moving the files to a Starter plan team, which allows broader collaboration. Please note that Professional plan features would not be available on those files.

You can also find additional guidance here: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/21051216849175-Guide-to-collaborating-with-clients-in-Figma. 

I understand this may not be the ideal setup for every workflow, but I’ll make sure to share your feedback about how these limitations affect collaboration internally with the team!