Dev Mode licensing needs a review

Unfortunately true and the reason why our management decided against dev mode.

I will boycot the dev mode too, so sad.

They had dev mode in free beta for a year, they had all the time in the world to “review” the pricing, but they persisted. I can assure you there will be no review. 😆 It makes them a huge amount of money.

Well it makes them lose a huge amount of enterprise customers as well.

How so? All the basic dev features are available for free like they always were so it’s not like you have to pay for it. If you want the additional benefits it brings though, you can pay.

Last week we had to have an re-orientation meeting among designers to deal with this out-of-touch pricing model.

We definitely can’t sell $35/devseat/month to C-level executives, as we have about 4x full stack developers who ocassionally inspect produced designs.

The pace of UX maturity is already limited by budget for Editor seats, because we had to cap the contribution to design files to only the most active dedicated designers. Which is a shame and a hit on my direct responsibility to grow design mindset.

$10-$20k/year for ‘just’ the design tool license is madness in the ears of commercially minded executive. And now we should tell them they should spend $20-$40k/year ON TOP so that developers can ‘look’ at the finished designs (that’s what it is for a an executive). It is an un-pitchable business case.

So we are now playing rock paper scissors to decide who is going to tell developers they will get this from now on:

And how do we deal with having to micro-document things.

I guarantee we would have easily quadrupled amount of licenses we buy if Editor seats were cheaper, spreading Figma to front-end developers, secondary contributors and external agencies. And we would have no issue pitching and spreading dev mode if the pricing was anywhere close to realistic added value.

This pricing strategy hurts us, and ultimately hurts Figma’s revenue, severely limiting it’s spread and creating business opportunities for inspect plugins and alternative design platforms.

Just to be clear. I really can’t share the dev link to users who don’t have a paid Figma account? So my customers can’t view the dev information even though i own the design file, which allows me to enable the dev mode?

This is kind of crazy in my opinion.

Just to clarify, Figma doesn’t have a concept of paid accounts, you pay for seats in the team. So others don’t have to pay anything if you want to give them access to dev mode, you have to pay for them to access it.

Well I have to admit after checking again the Properties panel is less stripped down than I thought or remembered. It shows the basics, yes. And it is free, yes. But still the old free Inspect panel felt more powerful somehow.

For example, Figma moved the Code export to where it is basically hidden for whatever reason (Right Click Menu on Canvas > Copy as > Copy code). In the old Inspect panel, it was more convenient before where you could actually see the code snippet first.
Also, you could switch between two different output formats which was useful when Figma misinterpreted font-weights of some fonts.
The new Properties panel also does not fully show all of the new Variables.

Dev Mode surely is way more effective but also a bit pricey.
Especially in the Enterprise plan where it costs over double the amount compared to Pro plan. As others said it might be very hard for Enterprise teams to convince their executives to get approval for the new licences and impactful cost increase.
Teams with an extremely uneven designers to engineers ratio might have a hard time because until now their cost was peanuts.

Right, and it is incredibly unfair. I can’t understand how that business model is even working. Instead of having a paid account that gives you access to all the features, you have to pay for every team a certain user is in. What the hell?

The pricing is just insane, there’s no chance our company would touch dev-mode seats. Most of our devs don’t dive deep enough into Figma to make use of half the features. They just want some basic information.

Figma, please let those who pay for Figma use dev mode in any Figma file shared with them.

I love Figma. Dev mode is fine, and now necessary. As a developer who sees plenty of Figma files from many different designers, I’m quite happy to pay for it, which I did yesterday.

But now it seems, for files created by others, on other “teams”, I have to persuade them, each of them, to pay for my “seat” !?

That’s true, I later realized it’s definitely a lot more stripped down version. Oh and what a nice tip about “copy code”, I didn’t know that! Very useful.

That’s correct. You don’t actually need to pay for it yourself.

@Figma_Moderation

Can you consider an evolution of your licences?
I have a need that I think is not specific but completely messed. up with this new plan.

In your development process you completly forgot Quality engineer, that is a team that check the feature & Design.

The inspect was a great improvement for them. And now they will not be able to inspect as they were.
They are not developer so Dev more is not meant for them. they are just inspectors…

I also have a question about your use case:

Let’s say a scrum team 6 dev, 1 PM, 1 Design er 1 QA.
there is only 1-2 expert in front end but the entire dev team can build the UI.

How can I allocate the dev mode? only the the Front end experts? Whi will increase considerably the Design work for a small part of the team?
To everyone an increase the cost by 100 ?

Example in my company 500 devs => 17500$ / month… hilarious

Hello Zeplin.

Haven’t ever touched dev mode in a professional capacity. I always handover well-defined Jira tickets with exports of the things, red-lined, etc. At this point I only use Figma because company is paying for it, but that will likely change if this trend continues. Performance degradation alone is enough for me to push for something else.

the Organization plan charges $25 per month for Dev Mode only
the Enterprise plan charges $35 per month for Dev Mode only

However, the Pro plan offers both a designer seat and Dev Mode for only $12 per month. Ridiculous

Unfortunately Figma is becoming a nightmare to our budget and admin control. We will be seriously considering moving to other platform if they keep on doing this.

For some reason, Figma is choosing to PUNISH its users for using their Dev mode with higher costs and illogical and abusive seat pricing. I saw a Zepplin ad the other day that said “Dev Mode is too expensive, so use Zepplin” and the pitch made a lot of sense. Does Figma think we’re stupid?

Such a good breakdown. Figma is making it impossible to justify using Figma. I don’t want to use XD and I don’t want to use Sketch and Zeplin—I want to use Figma with working and usable and logically priced dev seats. Figma is the only one stopping that from being the reality

Has anyone figured out what this means for consultants? For example, my team does UXUI design but our clients (or a third party) do the development. I have asked them to look into the “Inspect” and “Export” tabs to see if it’s enough but I’m worried they’ll come back asking for more. I can’t afford to pay for their licenses out of my own budget, and it seems equally odd to require our client/ dev teams to pay for licenses for software we chose to use. Am I missing something?

Jup makes no sense at all, afaik there’s no different feature set in Dev mode between those plans.

Please simply think about the points below, Figma team,

1. Some basic maths is wrong to charge on inspecting. No company can agree with at least a double cost of design tool just becuz of fxxking basic inspecting
2. Designers need to paid all the bills and buy some seats, if Developers are not in the same company. Just imagine the case of consultants and freelancer and you will know.
3. Figma ignore the billing experience but just beta for user experience. This a such a joke for the biggest design tool company

new policy looks like scam

Developer here, I just bought my own “seat” as I thought that would grant me access to Dev Mode on a file created by a freelance designer… nope.

I can’t push that cost to our designer. Figma, what are you doing?! Guess I’ll cancel my subscription and ask our designer to consider different tools.