[LAUNCHED] All plans should offer more than 4 variable modes

We were even willing to pay the $75 per seat month to get more modes, but once we got approval and tried to sign up were then told there is a minimum of 6 seats and $5500 a year. As a team of 2 designers, that just doesn’t work. Incredibly bummed after working to get approval to upgrade our team to walk away from talking to Figma’s sales team with ‘well just have to make it work with 4 modes’.

Totally agree! 4 modes is not enough! when you move beyond basic light/dark mode usage and into more ‘multi-dimensional’ theming it becomes apparent very quickly that modes are the real bottleneck. I also find it funny there was a lot of official examples (including even Dylan during the first intro of variables) of using modes to hold structured data for items (similar to JSON) when you’re limited to only 4 its not a real use case for this IMO. I think on the pro plan especially it should be increased to 10 at least? for use cases like these to be more viable. Because as others have pointed out the jump in cost from Pro to Org is too significant for features such as this alone. Please reconsider the limit 🙏

@Rob_Jurewicz I can’t believe they’re charging $5,500/year to use what is clearly a design feature, not an enterprise feature. At first I thought it was just a stupidly priced, very expensive feature, but it turns out it’s a feature that’s not even available to me. I simply don’t have six designers. This is such a ridiculous pricing scheme. What are they even thinking?

Completely agree, somewhere in the middle for the Professional plan please. We support 7 breakpoints and I’ve been forced to think of ways to hack what is a really great new feature. The choice of 4 seems like an intentionally small number to encourage upgrades 🫤

This hits the nail on the head. When the options are this limiting, we’ll just find ways to hack around it.

Those of us in small teams (or sometimes the solo designer in a company) will never get an enterprise account approved by our departments. Or what about freelance designers? They’ll never conceivably need an enterprise account.

People are excited for use-cases beyond light and dark mode. OP’s very common use-case, product variants, wouldn’t even really be supported for the most standard variety of clothing sizes. People interested in using it for responsive screen layouts? Good luck if you support more than 4 breakpoints or screen sizes.

https://www.figma.com/file/QDKl0fwEtUUZsaeVwfquBr/Furniture-responsive-web-page?node-id=0%3A620&mode=dev shu fugmani kodini tashlab yuboringlar

This honestly just seems completely insane to place any limit on modes.

It’s obvious that Figma is headed in the direction of being more aligned with the dev side of things. Presumably that is the main reason why variables were even added.

Why would you place an arbitrary artificial limit within Figma for something that has no limits in development?

This could easily be a problem for an individual developer. (who is never going to even consider paying for an enterprise plan) And to be honest, is this feature really going to be a deciding factor for any team to make the upgrade?

All this does is discourage people from using Figma.

Totally agree! It does not make sense.

Agreed!! At the very least give us 10! 4 is not enough!

4 modes is so few that I basically wrote off the feature as soon as they announced the limitation. If Figma wants folks to buy in on this feature, then they should probably allow more than 4 modes.

I’m genuinely curious why there’s a limitation at all, beyond any RAM-based technical reasoning. Why stop at 40 for enterprise? If the feature is designed for developer and designer integrations, it should be unlimited, should it not?

I agree with folks who say this is arbitrary and makes the feature useless.

Adding on to the bandwagon here. I was inspired by the awesome Ford demo from Config this year to really beef up our design system with variables, but very quickly learned that Modes are a huge, unnecessary bottle-neck.

My company currently has the Organization level plan and while I don’t think it’s completely impossible that we could switch to Enterprise, having to simply for more variable modes is pretty much a non-starter. We’re also fortunate(?) enough to qualify for an Enterprise level plan as we do have 6+ users, but as others have said, locking something like variable modes behind not only such a steep paywall but also an arbitrary chair limit is quite frankly absurd. Are we really meant to get by using only 4 modes at most for individual and even org plans?

I’m of the opinion that modes should be unlimited, but at the very least the arbitrary limit should be higher than it is for non-Enterprise level plans. Please at least consider upping it to a good 10+, because otherwise this has effectively kneecapped an incredibly useful feature that the community has been looking forward to for a long time now.