Why's the "Variables API" only available on enterprise plans?

I’m not

Yeah this is super disappointing.

We’re a small team of 4 and we can’t sync variables between design and code without using some sort of clunky export workflow or build our own plugin, just to grab the variables.

I would like to add my voice to this. I don’t see how this is helping Figmas goals. By constraining Figmas ability to integrate deeply into delivery pipelines it is impeding Figmas stickiness. Its creating a situation where customers must first become big enough to be enterprise before they are able to integrate Figma into their CI. Surely it is better for Figma to get deeply embedded into product delivery as early as possible. This, in turn, will help their customers be successful, grow and ultimately become enterprise customers.

Also chiming in that this seems to make more sense on organization level - I think this would be hugely useful and still very separate to our needs across organization and enterprise plans.

This really needs to be implemented. Managing the transition & syncing of variables from Figma to Dev is clunky without this API. Doesn’t feel like this should be gated for smaller teams - if anything it would encourage Figma use and embed the dev team more within the product. Really hope they change this.

So, I understand why they would want to lock down the ability to write variables, as that is a pretty juicy feature and genuinely solves a difficult problem.

but really?? I can’t even make a simple GET request to read my variables from remote. Absolutely wild

I was excited to see that I could build a dynamic component documentation with the file api, this turned into sadness after realizing that a crucial part of our design system was hidden behind the enterprise plan for arbitrary reasons.

I guess the “solution” for non-enterprise folks is to create copies of every component for every variable mode, exponentially increasing the load of the file api.

@m.trenker I just had the same experience and I am going throught the coping stages right now: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance

Discovering that this feature is enterprise only was also very frustrating for our team because we explored to shift our design system towards variables, but without the REST API it lost almost all it’s usefulness and thus design variables didn’t get adopted at all.

I also wanted to share my disappointment this and other features (like more modes) are locked behind enterprise.

I can appreciate that sometimes things can be trickier/resources intensive behind the scenes and that comes with a cost too. So I’m not suggesting that these are just included in Organisation - I’d be happy to pay for these additional features in some form but the jump to Enterprise is expensive and not viable.

I would love to see a handful of features be paid-for bolt-ons if you want them. For example:

Need more modes?+$4/user/month
Dev mode? +$5/user/month
Variables scope on the API? +$x/user/month

Let us add on and pay for the things we need on top of any plan 🙏

If Dev mode was available as a stand-alone paid add-on, all of our developers would have it instead of just getting by with a free account 🤷