It would be great if the professional plan offered more than 4 variable modes. Right now I want to set up a mode for each component size-- XS - XL, 5 sizes all together-- which puts me over the 4 limit for pro, but well under the 40 limit for enterprise, which is a quantity I will never need. And there’s no use case for enterprise at all for a team our size.
I think 10-12 modes for pro would be perfect to give small teams like mine room to grow before we reach the scale where an enterprise plan would be worth consideration.
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.
Agreed, looks like figma is starting to get Adobe-fied for the worse
The 4 option limit prevents any real use for paid users other than light/dark mode creation. It’s a terrible practice to offer tiers within tiers for features. You have to pay to use it, but have to pay more to make it useable? No thanks.
Same for me. I have 8 categories. Each have different name, slogan, description, icon, color code etc… But I can only add 4… It makes no sense for me to ‘contact sales’ for an enterprise option, as I run a small design studio on my own. Enterprise plan for a solopreneur. This feels wrong. But, with this limit of max 4 modes, I am not able to use this excellent feature. I feel left out, I feel unwanted, I feel abandoned, I feel sad about Figma not wanting me anymore. I will cry now and will see, what new is out there for designers to use. Maybe something next-gen with AI. Have to check, I think I once saw an ad on FB of an AI driven UX tool. Cheers!
Completely agree, somewhere in the middle for the Professional plan please. We support 7 breakpoints and I’ve been forced to think of ways to hack what is a really great new feature. The choice of 4 seems like an intentionally small number to encourage upgrades
100% 100% agree with this! I had a call earlier today with a sales person and the Organization plan is annual only and super expensive for a startup trying to get a prototype with more than 4 products. I’ve had to find alternatives since using the Variables to present products for a client who wanted a good-looking working prototype. Even if there are “packages” of 10-20 modes to add-on, that makes a lot more sense! I just don’t think people will use Variables either if it has these extreme cut offs
This is such an arbitrary limit. It makes it impossible to really use modes at all unless you’re on the enterprise plan. This is just making me have to figure out how to hack around this limitation and make super confusing design system and not how I can upgrade to enterprise.
We are a team of 30 people (with 15 developers and a single designer) in the context of biomedical research. We are not registered as a non-profit, but our work is only financed from publicly funded grants and hospital foundations. And of course the applications we create are only used within the public health sector, therefore definitely not for profit.
For a team like ours, the price jump from a few hundred dollars a year to over 2k is massively prohibitive.
If you put out a feature such as variable modes (which is a core feature which has been requested for years) and then apply such a ridiculous cap… well the whole thing simply feels like price gouging.
I want to leave this with some suggestions rather than a simple gripe: Change the pricing or, at the very least, add another plan between the professional and organizational plan. The price jump from Pro to Org is 3.75x () while the jump from Org or Enterprise is 1.7x
That initial jump between the pro and org plans is too wide both in terms of cost and features. We certainly don’t need things like SSO, private plugins, or even analytics. However we would happily pay 1.5x more to have branching and merging and of course reasonable cap on variable modes (though that one still feels like core feature to me but )
I hate to say this, but as others have pointed out, it really does feel like the first signs of Adobe’s business model rearing its ugly head. Are we really going to have to go through yet another cycle of watching a great product die a slow death while waiting for yet another similar independent product to come and disrupt these archaic business models?
Four modes is not just borderline useless, it’s also not in line with any of their other tier upgrades.
Look at these pricing tiers. As you go up in tiers, the additional features are all about scaling up your operations and actual enterprise features — things larger organizations need, with virtually nothing that affects the actual designs. Being able to support more than four modes is simply not an “enterprise” feature.
Being able to control both spacing, a color theme, and some other size adjustments can probably be done very effectively with 8–10 modes. If you need more than that, you’re probably scaling up to support something bigger than the average site, and it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to require an upgrade (still maybe not to $75/month for every user).
The worst part for me is that I’ve put a great deal of effort into building a library of flexible components with the intent of making it possible for content design work to take place in Figma. Figjam doesn’t support toggling properties, so I can’t even have my teams use the components there. If I were to upgrade my small team, the yearly bill would go from around $1,050/year to well over $5,000, and this is for most people to have accounts they would only rarely use — just so a smaller number of people could actually make use of the product.
Maximum of 4 variable modes is useless if you want to do anything proper. I get if professional has a limit, but not organization. Come on @Figma_Support!
We were even willing to pay the $75 per seat month to get more modes, but once we got approval and tried to sign up were then told there is a minimum of 6 seats and $5500 a year. As a team of 2 designers, that just doesn’t work. Incredibly bummed after working to get approval to upgrade our team to walk away from talking to Figma’s sales team with ‘well just have to make it work with 4 modes’.
Totally agree! 4 modes is not enough! when you move beyond basic light/dark mode usage and into more ‘multi-dimensional’ theming it becomes apparent very quickly that modes are the real bottleneck. I also find it funny there was a lot of official examples (including even Dylan during the first intro of variables) of using modes to hold structured data for items (similar to JSON) when you’re limited to only 4 its not a real use case for this IMO. I think on the pro plan especially it should be increased to 10 at least? for use cases like these to be more viable. Because as others have pointed out the jump in cost from Pro to Org is too significant for features such as this alone. Please reconsider the limit
@Rob_Jurewicz I can’t believe they’re charging $5,500/year to use what is clearly a design feature, not an enterprise feature. At first I thought it was just a stupidly priced, very expensive feature, but it turns out it’s a feature that’s not even available to me. I simply don’t have six designers. This is such a ridiculous pricing scheme. What are they even thinking?
Completely agree, somewhere in the middle for the Professional plan please. We support 7 breakpoints and I’ve been forced to think of ways to hack what is a really great new feature. The choice of 4 seems like an intentionally small number to encourage upgrades
This hits the nail on the head. When the options are this limiting, we’ll just find ways to hack around it.
Those of us in small teams (or sometimes the solo designer in a company) will never get an enterprise account approved by our departments. Or what about freelance designers? They’ll never conceivably need an enterprise account.
People are excited for use-cases beyond light and dark mode. OP’s very common use-case, product variants, wouldn’t even really be supported for the most standard variety of clothing sizes. People interested in using it for responsive screen layouts? Good luck if you support more than 4 breakpoints or screen sizes.
This honestly just seems completely insane to place any limit on modes.
It’s obvious that Figma is headed in the direction of being more aligned with the dev side of things. Presumably that is the main reason why variables were even added.
Why would you place an arbitrary artificial limit within Figma for something that has no limits in development?
This could easily be a problem for an individual developer. (who is never going to even consider paying for an enterprise plan) And to be honest, is this feature really going to be a deciding factor for any team to make the upgrade?
All this does is discourage people from using Figma.
4 modes is so few that I basically wrote off the feature as soon as they announced the limitation. If Figma wants folks to buy in on this feature, then they should probably allow more than 4 modes.
I’m genuinely curious why there’s a limitation at all, beyond any RAM-based technical reasoning. Why stop at 40 for enterprise? If the feature is designed for developer and designer integrations, it should be unlimited, should it not?
I agree with folks who say this is arbitrary and makes the feature useless.
) while the jump from Org or Enterprise is 1.7x
)
