I have seen a lot of posts on reddit, linkedin and here all complaining re: Figmas opaque billing practices being so dark pattern-riddled it would put most scam sites to shame. There are countless posts across the web as old as 5 years complaining about this but I’ve yet to see any meaningful change. Adding seats and over-subscribing is way too easy with few guardrails, but reducing your subscription is far more unclear and difficult.
What will it take for Figma to actually do something about this? Why is nothing being done?
I keep having additional seats added to my plan accidentally. This has happened to my organization at least 3 times now. Every single time I fix the issue I go through the labyrinth of admin billing settings and think I have all my bases covered, but this system seems to be designed explicitly to funnel users into higher billing. The latest is because “Seat approval settings” was set to “Manual unless seat is available” (I had an unused seat, which was added because of a previous dark-pattern driven error). There is no way remove the seat from your account entirely - you vacate the seat then wait until the end of the billing cycle when it will disappear. I had an employee accidentally try and use a dev feature which automatically shuffled him into the dev seat I was trying to remove. I didn’t catch it right away and now I’m on the hook for another month of billing. I’m busy with a lot to deal with - having to be constantly vigilant with my subscription for accidentally adding more to my billing is unfeasible. The only way I would believe this wasn’t some cynical extortion would be if we were allowed a grace period to get out of that trap. It wouldn’t solve the problem of having to closely monitor my account, but at least it would allow me to fix the issues that Figma refuses to fix.
Having anything set to automatic by default when it comes to billing is really shady business practice.
The product is fine, but I am shopping around for somewhere else to take my org. At this point I would settle for a lesser product that operated with some base ethical standard.