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

This. I have spent the past two hours looking for a workaround to this issue and frankly the whole architecture/limitations around tokens and variables is turning me off from Figma as a tool for our design system. 

We’re a small company, I’m the only figma dev. Prof plan is perfect for us. Except for modes. As soon as penpot release their latest render engine, (and background blur!), we will be self hosting penpot and saying goodbye to what was the best app in its space. This is some adobe level en****ification and were you actually bought by Adobe I wouldn’t be surprised. But you weren’t, so this doesn’t make sense. 

Just unlock the amount of available variable modes for paid plans completely…

It just feels so damn greedy right now and it makes me and my teams extremely frustrated!

Your pricing strategy can still be segmented in terms of other types of functionality.

More pressure. Totally unusable for centralised management of any accessible token system. There’s no reason to limit this! This “feature” is never going to make me upgrade and triple my figma costs. 

How is this not fixed yet...

Dear Figma Team. I was testing for a while now and was ready to transition into the “Professional” plan. As probably the only one in my team to use Figma, the “Organization” plan feels like overkill. I just stumbled above this limitation - initially I was not aware about this at all and i am a bit shocked.

Even a single developer wants to work with a complex setup to benefit from the modular workflow.
Honestly this does not only shake up my plans how to use Figma but my image of your company.

It seems you know exactly about the pain and want to push people into the highest tier - if this is not your intention consider increasing this number to 16 ..or my god at least 8.

The other thing that puzzles me a bit is your radio silence in a few of those threads that bring up valid points.

I really wanted to like this tool and welcome it into my workflow.

Hello everyone,

it’s been a while since I posted here or even looked at this thread, and obviously not much has changed. I see people struggling and trying hacks, so I would like to inform those, who either didn’t stumble upon my plugin Infinite variable modes yet, or it didn’t work for them back then, when I posted the last time. There’s been some fixes done, performance enhancements etc.

It’s still just a workaround and it has some limitations, but there seem to be few people that benefit from it and are willing to pay the little subscription, so you might as well go and give it a chance (it has a 7-day free trial).

https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1404783727338541788/infinite-variable-modes

I just created a plugin using AI… Does the same thing as IVM.

Hi Peter, that’s awesome, now you have infinite modes and completely free!

I would be a little bit more humble about it though, since I know very well how complicated such ‘simple’ plugin is to make and debug. There were so many nuances, complications and so much time and thought invested into every detail, that it’s very hard for me to believe that someone ‘just created’ the same thing by vibe coding. But who knows, maybe I’m just not a good enough vibe coder, or coder in general for that matter :)

Hi Michael,

Ah, I think there might have been a little mix-up in how I phrased things (or how it came across) — I didn’t mean it as a joke or to downplay the amount of work that goes into creating something like your plugin. I have huge respect for the time, thought, and detail that goes into building and debugging tools like that.

What I meant was that I had “just” literally put something together earlier today to solve my own frustration with the limited number of modes. It’s really just a rough workaround using a couple of platforms — definitely nowhere near as advanced as yours, but it does the job I need for now until Figma (hopefully!) introduces more modes natively.

So apologies if it read differently — that wasn’t my intention at all.