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

Also adding to fuel.

Want to see this limit lifted as it’s hard to experiment on small projects with just 4 modes.
8 would be more fitting.

it is not possible to create library components that support 3 breakpoints and two color modes.

Hey @Karttunen_Juha, our variables team says that this is actually possible. Just be sure to put sizing/breakpoints into a separate collection (with mobile/desktop/tablet modes) from colors (light/dark mode).

Hey All, thank you for your continued feedback!

Our Variables team hears you. We will continue to follow this thread and take your feedback into future consideration. We fully intend to improve and polish the Variables experience with your feedback in mind.

To fuel up the conversation we also miss the opportunity to add more than 4 modes. Please please Figma reconsider this 🙂

I don’t think any limit makes sense. To me it’s like saying, “Yo Developers, here in this new programming language you can use 4 whole arrays per app. Awesome, right?”

Or for writers, 4 chapters per book.
Carpenters get 4 doors per building.
Musicians get 4 notes per song.
Lawyers get 4 sentences per argument.
Cooks get 4 ingredients per restaurant.
Stores can sell to 4 customers per day.
Cars can make 4 turns per trip.
etc.

We hear you and understand the frustration. We’ll pass this onto our team for consideration.
As a temporary workaround, you can try creating multiple files with 4 modes, but also keep in mind that you won’t be able to “mode swap” between the modes from different files.

Please note that this is not directed towards you personally @dvaliao and I really do appreciate your offer for a solution. But here is a message to pass along to the team…

“Temporary workaround” is a term we use when filling the gap while a feature is actively being perfected, improved, or fixed. Anyone working in the software space knows that these things can take time, and personally I have always been happy to wait for the Figma team as the work released is for the most part polished and bug-free.

In this case however, the feature as designed meets user expectation. The business model around said feature is what’s “broken”. Months after release there is still no word that this is ever set to change, so I feel “temporary” is a bit of a reach here.

Breaking down designs into multiple files adds the sort of maintenance overhead and complexity which modes was partly designed to solve.

Given that words matter, we should call this “temporary workaround” an “awkward and unecessary hack” designed to give paying customers (of all plans) the illusion of full access to a core feature which they expect to use along with all other core features.

Upgrading to Enterprise is also a bit hard to fathom when support for nested components and no support for conditionally setting a component state via a variable rule.

Just found out about this ridiculous limit. I was going to use variables to better align with the utility classes our devs use. For this particular project, I have a customer with 8 e-commerce stores that share a lot of design components but have different branding per store and more are coming. Guess I’ll have to keep using styles then, which is becoming very unpractical for this particular project 🙄.

What’s more surprising to me is the lack of a step-up for the organisation plan! I contract for a large organisation that doesn’t need any of the features that come with an enterprise plan besides more modes. How are you not offering more than 4 modes for a plan targeted at organisations? it’s massively limiting and makes switching from tools like Token Studio an impossibility. Modes are used in different ways for different companies, it’s not a linear scale depending on the size of the company, and this hurts designers’ ability to be creative with their design tokens.

I need to get on the bandwagon here as launching a highly sort after feature but then constraining it in such a way that your users have to significantly level up their licence for a plan that does not suit them to un-constrain said feature is quite bewildering.

Reading all the replies, what surprises me is that we aren’t asking for much and many of us in the thread would easily upgrade to organisation licence for more modes. Our studio were even willing to pay for Enterprise licenses for our two seats, however there is no budging on the minimum seat requirements.

If it’s all about money, which I hope it’s not, just doing some basic sums shows that there is easy money to be made by Figma, as well as responding to what’s important from their users.

159 have voted this up. Taking these 159 votes and upgrading those, as a minimum, to 1 organisational licence for 12 months would = $86.4k. Increase that to more than 1 licence and we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I find it very hard to understand why this feature would be released in such a way and would love to hear the rationale, apart from the obvious, behind it and would hope that Figma can come to the party and meet us in the middle.