Enable Dev Mode Annotations Feature for Developers as well

I believe you set it yourself and with dev mode they can see it but Figma restructured everything and they are VAMPIRES now adding insane costs EVERYWHERE so with their payment structure, each dev needs to pay like a 35$ seat just to view dev mode which most devs only use to see color, padding, notes. Our devs don’t use the CSS code or anything so there is going to be a lot of shift in many companies discussing switching over to another software, Figma, fix this. Offer different payment for different dev mode options, lower the costs, make this make sense for all sorts of organizations cuz you’re about to lose some customers.

Well, in my opinion there isn’t really a good alternative and switching to another software itself would involve immense costs. Just the hours you would spend “moving” a design system. Plugins. Onboarding people. And much more. Of course the costs are annoying, but I’m not paying them privately. Of course, I can’t put myself in the shoes of a start-up or small company. I come from a very large company. But I generally don’t understand all the “surprise” in the forum here… the fact that Dev Mode was disappearing in this form had been known for some time.

The Dev Mode functions are cool and I already use them. But I can also understand why people here say that the functions that Dev Mode brings should be included. But at the end of the day, Figma has to make money. The alternative would probably be to make the design seats more expensive.

In my opinion, force to pay more just for taking measurements is a very questionable business decission, and the way “seats” work very incomprehensible. I would pay for a professional plan if that allowed me to show my projects to every developer I want so they make measurements without editing.

Other option would be to sell seats like this:

• A plan for designers (editor) who don’t want Dev Mode.
• A plan for developers who don’t want to edit.
• A plan with edition privileges + Dev Mode. *

*This last option would be could to be paid as a full seat where the “payer” decides if he keeps both features or if he keeps just edition privileges and gives “Dev Mode” to a visitor, so all the embarrassing situation of “viewer” asking admin for Dev Mode so admin pays for him would be simplified from the beginning.

Well… I guess my original topic here got kind of lost 😅 I am not interested in discussing the fairness of dev mode or whatever, I just want developers also to be able to use the annotation and measure features.
I think there are a lot of other threads about the dev mode payment model in general already.

This is a great idea. Our team has been talking about this today. We don’t really want to give the dev team full edit access to all the design files, but would love a way for them to be able to use the annotations tool as a way of noting dev status on things, etc.

Before I included the annotations directly in the designs, but when I saw the dev-mode annotations tool I loved it, but I didn’t realize that just to see it the user had to pay. It doesn’t seem right to me, developers only need to “see” and in no way are we going to pay per user who only sees.

In my case what we will do is put all the annotations back out of dev mode.

It is a pity.

Very confusing, as a developer who (tries to) engineer more useful dev mode stuff like code connect for our organisation I’m trying to find out why I do not have these tools (annotate and measure) in files where I’m not the editor while I do have a dev mode license in our enterprise (license) where I’m supposed to be able to view all files. Aren’t these tools meant for developers?

Well I really hope Figma Pay attention here, this new pricing model is frankly getting a bit expensive and doesn’t meet the needs of the end user. 

Whilst the dev mode is a welcome addition, especially with the annotations, the dev seat is too limited in functionality! You are effectively asking me to pay again for someone to view my designs… ridiculous!

Developers and other roles such as business analysts, project managers etc should not be able to change design files but need to be able to add Annotations (and Page level notes if possible)

At least Figma are fixing the issue of double licensing when a 3rd party designer collaborates and already has a Figma license (thank you).

Personally I’m not interested in Figjam or slides and don’t appreciate being forces to effectively buy them.

I was surprised to discover today that our dev team can not annotate nor use the measurement tool!?