Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

Love the feature.  Hate how it was rolled out. Viewers must be able to see annotations. If this isn't a bug, then it's an extremely short-sighted decision, possibly a misguided attempt at monetization.

As someone working for a SaaS company, most of my viewers are internal stakeholders—sales teams, product managers, and executives—none of whom are developers. Expecting them to become developers just to fully understand a project is absurd. And for those working with external clients, this issue is even more frustrating. Under the current setup, you'd have to grant a client developer access just so they can see project annotations, which makes no sense.

While component-based annotations and comments provide a workaround, they are a poor substitute. This approach is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t result in additional charges just to let people see how something is supposed to function. Restricting annotation creation to full and developer subscriptions is understandable, but limiting visibility for viewers? That’s a serious misstep that results in a frustrating and inefficient experience for Figma users.

bump

This ability to create the most useful and useless feature at the same time, is brilliant. Did Figma end up being bought by Adobe? It seems so. Annotations visible to everyone... for YESTERDAY!

In which plans can annotations be viewed? Our team members with 'can view' access can't see my annotations, only the colored numbers.

You need a full or a dev seat in any paid plan to see them

+1 on this request. My whole team outside of just my FE eng need to see the annotations so that thye can understand functionality. if it’s not viewable by all then I have to make my own annotations anyways which wastes more of my time and defeats the whole purpose of making the handoff process faster.

+1, this is extremely frustrating. It’s a great tool, but it loses impact when you can’t share with the larger team. 

Agree with everyone here. There is absolutely no point having annotations if I can’t share them with the wider team. Figma team, please pull your socks up, stop being another money grubbing corporation and make this an actually useful feature - make annotations visible to everyone!

I’ve never posted before, but this is a HUGE miss by Figma! I was excited to see annotations as a new feature, but if those with view only accounts cannot see them, then this feature is worthless. Stakeholders need to be able to see annotations, not just designers and developers. Looks like I’ll be going back to the old way of annotating until this oversight is fixed.

+1 Just presented an annotated design the a customer and am about to share it with them. That’ll be a nice surprise for them that they cannot see the annotations they just saw.

Please consider making annotations available for everyone.