Adding editors is costly and misleading

I’ve had the same issue Ash. It’s not clear, especially if you have a large UX team who would not have access to invoices and billing etc, so they would have to find out through someone else that a charge was made.

Yep, correct. I was casually looking at my bank statement for a separate, unrelated reason and I noticed the $75 sucked out of my account without anyone asking I felt about that! What the hell?

+1 to this - it would be super helpful if there was a simple prompt to allow users to understand when something they are doing is going to incur a cost 🙏

I have just has this same issue. My monthly subscription more than doubled, and it was all due to me re-adjusting the interface so I could categorise my files. Whilst doing this I added and editor and a figjam subscription - absolutely no idea why.

Figma were kind enought to refund the money, but considering UX is something the product promotes, they really need to consider applying that principle to their own interface to stop people from upgrading their account by stealth.

The costs have also started concerning me a little, when you look at how they mount up by just adding an editor, all of a sudden the prices of the competitors does not seem as bad.

Be careful Figma.

I would wager that this is a great way for them to make money, especially in large companies. We started our team account with just 5 designers and in the end had something like 75 editors, because people would invite all the developers without realizing that we would get charged for all of them. In a company of close to a thousand employees something like that does not get noticed in time and the hassle of converting everyone back to just viewers and so on is a task nobody is really in charge off (because nobody knew it would be an issue). So its easier for everyone to just leave it.

But it’s the same for everyone. We had InVision and similar things happened there, but at least we had an enterprise account with an account manager there. We also had an agreed yearly price and they would notify us if we have gone above our agreed user count.

The risk with Figma is, that you are still using a normal team account, but can all of a sudden have literally dozens of billed members, but with no account manager who might notify you.

I personally think that a lot of companies have realized that this is a pretty lucrative business model. Make it easy to add users and give only the most essential amount of notifications so as to not draw too much attention to how much you are really paying. But this is as old a tactic as subscriptions themselves.

Yes I have you agree with you about it being a good way of them making money, but I did not want to say it directly.

Thats a real shame. It has kind of made me view Figma differently.
Does XD work in the same way, does it have the same concept adding editors, I was looking on the site and could not see that.

Going forward I will most definitely keep an eye on my account. As well as (unfortunately) keeping a little eye out for other similar products

From what we have tried, they are all following the same pattern pretty much. It doesn’t matter even what kind of tool, it just makes sense for them financially to do it like that. Since most big players have investors behind them it is literally their duty to make as much money as possible. Going for some, lets say “grey UX patterns” is only logical, if everyone can always say “well, everyone is doing it like that…”.

I have to agree - the billing process and interface are highly misleading, if not unscrupulous.

I subscribed to a FigJam only plan ($3 per month) and was charged for a FigJam design seat with my bill - adding an additional $20 each month. Seriously!!!

No warning or confirmation that “you are adding a design file at $x per month” - nothing.

I’ve since canceled my subscription, and as a result, the company I’m consulting for will too.

I recently found out I’ve been billed for FigJam seats for several months even though I don’t have a single FigJam file in my account. Just opened it once by mistake during the beta and apparently it switched me to an editor with out any form of opt-in to let me know about the cost. They’ve been charging me for months.

Figma also charged my team for an annual license seat where the member had been removed over 12 months ago. Must be a bug in their system. I did not downgrade the editor to viewer before removing the account… however how can it be expected I should know that removing a member would not remove the seat? The support was only willing to refund one month of FigJam and regarding the annual seat they are ignoring the inquiry just sending standardised answers not even addressing the issue presented.

In my country this is called fraud…

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