Well why should it be included in Professional but not in the two higher tier plans?

My interpretation is that Dev seats cannot be purchased with a Professional plan.

However, Dev Mode will be available for all Editor seats on paid plans.

We strictly want Dev seats on professional plan though because with Editor permissions there’s always a chance that folks make unwanted changes to the document.

Maybe Figma will update the Member panel for the Team and include “viewer-restricted” Editor permissions but Dev-mode enabled, so basically Dev seats.

Let’s just agree that it is quite confusing at best…

Yeah, we can definitely agree it is very confusing. 😅

And I misunderstood what you meant originally. Does Dev Mode work differently for setting viewers/editors when you share a file?

In other words, if you set someone as “can view” on a file, are they not able to access Dev Mode at all?

In other words, if you set someone as “can view” on a file, are they not able to access Dev Mode at all?

Since Dev Mode is currently available to everyone I have no chance of knowing it for sure until next year… I tested revoking Edit rights on a Member and setting design role to “viewer restricted” and the person was still able to access Dev Mode. But that’s just because of the open Beta. Guess I’ll find out next year then 😅

Unfortunately, the Properties panel that was available as well seems to display way less information than the old Inspect panel.

If an investigation goes ahead, I for one will be following that closely as any public consultation may require us to submit this kind of price-gouging evidence to the regulators.

I wouldn’t think the free beta would matter, since you’re not talking about giving free users access to the file.

I think the only purpose of offering dev-only seats is because Organization/Enterprise customers don’t want to pay full price for users that will only be using Figma for read-only tasks.

I would bet that these dev seats are just accounts that are restricted to only viewing files. If so, it wouldn’t really make sense to have something like that for the professional plan, since they are independent accounts and not owned by an organization.

10-12 modes please. It’s so restricting for an agency like mine.

Seems like an intentional throttling of innovation for the sake of appeasing the new high table? and believe me, I get it, the world is a vampire. 4 mode limit seems like it makes sense until you realize how many other debilitating limitations that the org-level accounts have to survive through on a daily basis.

4 mode limit? Millions of dollars to upgrade?! No type/ stroke weight/variables switching /elevation support? Do you guys have friends in real companies that you run this by? Cuz that’s…an aggressively pointless limitation that renders this unusable in a professional setting. Still luv ya. But plz plz plz help 😭🙏❤️. We are getting burnt out.

This limitation of having only four modes for the Org Plan feels like Adobe’s finally getting into monetization mode here.

This is such an absurd arbitrary limit for this functionality.

Organisation has the same 4 modes as professional, it should be more. At least halfway between Professional and Enterprise.

It seems to me that limiting the amount of variable modes is an absurd money grab, to push people into Enterprise without having a use for any of the other Enterprise features.

Absolutely. 4 variable modes for $12/mo/editor or 40 variable modes for $75/mo/editor. This is a greedy taste of honey monetization approach.

The scale here is entirely greedy and kneecaps our usage of variables. What’s next? A limit on the number of styles? Pages? Components?

I understand that a me too post like these are typically discouraged. But, there was no way to strongly voice dissatisfaction in a detailed way. So, thank you for reading and come on, capping variable modes along subscription plans is unnecessary.

Having recently delved into how these can be used for a design system, I can honestly report that modes have everything to do with design and nothing to do with employee structure.

The Enterprise tier seems to be all about employee structure EXCEPT for this modes feature.

This is an issue for us as well, if we would be able to upgrade to entreprise with only a few seats that would solve the issue, but there is a minimum of seats (that we don’t need) that you have to pay for to upgrade. Maybe 8-10 modes for Org plans make more sense? and this is still a great incentive for pro teams to upgrade to org.

I totally agree this is a design feature, not a company size feature. I at least need 15 modes because our company does a lot of co-branding. I was willing to go to enterprise while I’m the only designer in the company, but the minimum is $5000 per year. Did anyone find hacky loop arounds already?

I’ve found a dumb way that you can use aliases to string together modes from different collections. It can work for some situations but not all.

For example I just used it to have three main themes in one collection for controlling background and foreground color, while another collection controls 4 accent colors. If I had more than these in my existing design system I could potentially use more collections. I wouldn’t be doing this nonsense if I just had unlimited modes.

It was inevitable

Hey @dvaliao any feedback from product? Is this a permanent decision?

This limitation is explicitly and AGRESSIVELY anti-user.

Hi @Hoby-Van-Hoose , thanks for this. I’m trying to do something similar. Can you please a bit detailed example of how you’re using aliases to stitch modes from different collections?

Agree. I primarily work as a consultant. Why shouldn’t I be able to utilise the power and flexibility of variables for, say, translating my designs into 4+ languages for checking text lengths on my designs before being penalised? The same goes for some of my clients, who only consist of me as a UX designer and 3-4 developers. This smells of easy moneymaking.

Completely agree here. I’ve completely given up using variables for now because it’s simply not scalable in our setting. This limit thwarts the design capabilities of the tool, and if this approach becomes a pattern, Figma is setting up a very nice ground for a new, more accessible tool to take over. Please do not make the same mistakes others have made in the past.

Hi @Aniket_Bhadane in the example I mentioned, I have:

1. Colors collection. Hex values, named for purpose.


2. Themes collection. 3 themes (modes) featuring different background colors. This contains a set of accent colors aliased to different base colors according to the background.


3. Accents collection. 1 accent “color” in 4 modes, which are aliases of the accent aliases in the themes collection.

So then for accent colors I want to change according to variables, I set their color to the Accent color. Then for instances or their containers, I set their modes to the Theme and Accent I want for that particular location.

If I need more than 4 accents I could do a couple things, neither of which are ideal:

• Add more colors to the themes and make an accents-secondary collection with modes that alias those additional theme colors. If you want to be able to choose one accent color and be able to switch between primary and secondary sets, you need to create ANOTHER collection that has the primary and secondary colors as modes. I did this already for a set of pattern colors that I needed 3 for primary and 4 for secondary. It’s not nice needing to set three different modes to get a color but it remains fully dynamic between both accent sets. You could have a total of 16 accent colors if you filled up all the possible modes this way.


• Add another theme mode where the accent colors are actually entirely different accent colors without their own name. This would allow you to double your available accent colors (or triple if you only had 2 themes to start with) but you’d have to keep track of what color they’re going to end up, outside of Figma Variables.

Please offer 12 modes for professional plan. It’s difficult to switch to variables if my small team can’t accommodate all themes and languages into it.

+1, why is there a limit at all? we’re already PAYING for prof. doesn’t make sense for our small team to upgrade to enterprise for this feature alone.

Adding to the pile here because I spent way to much time trying to find a workaround to this limitation

➡️ Some of the basic usecases shared by Figma for variables modes are for products of an e-commerce and for translation.

• Both usecases are common for solo designer and small team


• Both usecase makes no sense with just 4 modes

If I want to use variable modes, I need to inform my client that something as simple as adding an item to a list it will increase Figma licence cost by 5000$.

It’s a very akward conversation.