Just saw that dev mode doesn’t work anymore for the devs and you have to pay this is ridiculous, I love Figma and we switched over a few years ago but they are nuking the product and its users, us, aren’t happy and it’s adding more work to our plate and more costs that we might switch over again and I will lose it if I have to redesign the entire thing in yet another software

These are very stupid restrictions, completely artificial, just to suck as much money as possible out of users. Give us the variables, remove the limit on the number of files and pages (3 pages, really???), give us the devmod. Don’t embarrass yourself, Figma.

I mean, what else did you expect from the closed piece of software that literally stores your personal and work files in the cloud?. This is a serious threat to privacy and security. They can literally ban you for no reason, and there have already been several cases on design twitter. They make the dev-mode a paid feature today, and the next thing could be the color picker or something like that. And this applies to every cloud service where you have no control over anything. Get real.

It feels like the whole pricing strategy for new features was half baked at best. I am not expecting new product features to be offered for free, although they could be free quality of life updates, but at least have a reasonable pricing point. I have worked with many devs (literally in the hundreds) in the last two decades, and I do not remember one dev who actually reads those code blocks from the design software. They especially take it as offending in most cases. The good use cases like annotations, which is basically making comments visible with some nice visual features, is suddenly $25 to view? To View? Really?

The problem is; I have access to annotations as a full seat designer. I prepare the designs, I prepare the annotations to show them; and suddenly, the devs cannot view it because they need to pay to see. They are there to view it, not to create, just to see.

So, I am paying for it, they are paying for it; we are being charged twice for the same function. Or I am being charged twice: once to create, and once to show. If I want to show this to a client with their own development team separate from my organization, we are asking to charge them to see their commissioned work. You can argue that it can be added to the cost, but it is a plain example of dark pattern.

Figma became Adobelized without the acquisition by Adobe.

I guess they are trying really hard to move us back to Sketch 🙂

Freaking venture capital world, it’s so toxic it’s killing products.

Here’s the recipe:

1. Create a product that is cheaper and better at solving a problem (Figma vs. Sketch)


2. Attract almost all the professionals in the field, create a fanbase


3. Start charging for previously free features, now that the exit barrier is too high for users to even think about leaving


4. Call Adobe and try to sell and become a billionaire


5. Fail!
   
   5.1. Cry in fetal position (optional)


6. Get frustrated and start charging for everything so you can become more profitable or maybe a bootstrap billionaire


7. See all your users start to hate you and switch back to their previous alternative or any new alternative


8. Cry again in fetal position (not optional)


9. Repeat!

Funny that there is zero reply in this thread from the community managers. Glad it’s not my job, but the lack of engagement is telling.

Maybe it’s just me, but getting a feeling of if they are “learning how to do this better and please bare with us” or if they are “sucks, but makes us money” is interesting.

Still no news, eh…

Dev Mode is also slow

Just post these on Twitter if you want to get a response from theme - can’t hide real user sentiment

Thanks for sharing these insights mate as I found It very much useful and informative.

This indeed is a terrible move.

Especially for one-man businesses/freelancers, working with many smaller clients, who use Figma to edit/create social posts for 1 hour every other week - usually with 2-3 different accounts. I now would have to get them to pay $720 a year to be able to continue their workflow (and include FigJam for some collaboration/brainstorm files.

I can already tell this is not going to work for 90% of all of my clients and all the other freelancers I work with. Being able to work in Figma for 1% of the time, is costing more than twice as their whole website + hosting + SSL + domainnames.