Here’s another context where this happens:
I’m a freelancer for Toptal and created a design file with my Editor account for a project. Now the project needs another designer, which already has his own Editor account for other projects.
If I add him to my file as editor, I will be charged for an extra Editor, right? Doesn’t make sense the same person, with the same account (same email, etc), pays twice as Editor…
Solution: if a user is added and already is a paying Editor, allow them to be editors on whatever files they collaborate.
This billing logic is complete madness… and I can’t find ways to justify it with reasons other than pure extraction - charging based on arbitrary “business logic”, instead of resources / service costs.
It seems that there is no definitive answer to this yet. So, I am curious how other freelancers setup their projects when working with many clients. Especially, if a client requests edit access. I end up having to duplicate files and sometimes even creating Teams for them.
Can’t really say more that what’s been listed above. At this point, it’s either stupidity, laziness or greed. Zero reason to continue this way of billing. Slack Connect for example is a very simple way of connecting orgs and everyone pays for their own staff. Professional orgs should be able to connect on files. This isn’t rocket science…which leads me to believe this is just greed and it’s unacceptable.
Just got billed a surprisingly high amount for my 1 person studio, all because I’m sharing design files with my clients who ALSO have their own paid Figma accounts? This not sustainable.
Plus it feels like a dark pattern UX trick to not even mention the billing consequences during the sharing process.
Can we at least share a “copy” of a Figma file with outside stakeholders without being charged, the way you can with every other design app on the planet? Maybe that’s already possible, but I can’t seem to figure it out.
i can’t believe this hasn’t been addressed yet! i’m a freelancer who needs to grant my (freelancing) developer access; they have a paid figma account but i’ll now need to pay double for them to work with my file. how does that make sense??? @Figma_Support are there going to be any answers? i can’t believe this pricing isn’t driving people away from using this program
Run into this problem so often, we have to go through and cull clients’ access until they realize they cant edit and ask for it back.
As a company, we would love to move to the organization plan for the extra features but with the extra costs the clients generate this isn’t sustainable for us.
Just been stung by this as well and only realised after a few months. No notification/alert to warn of any additional charges when adding an editor from outside of the company.
Same issue here - got stung with this when we started using Figma by not understanding the billing method. Now it causes issues, like everyone above, when a client wants to edit items or we need to collaborate with another firm.
If we were doing this work using Adobe Creative Cloud (god-forbid!) and sharing files with a client also paying for Creative Cloud, that would be it – no further charges for either side.
Having to take out an additional Creative Cloud subscription to edit a shared file would not be okay, and that’s what’s happening here.
Imagine if Adobe started doing that - people would lose their S*** over it.
I don’t understand the rationale for this model other than to increase Figma revenues.
It feels counter to frictionless collaboration between client / agency / freelancer.
And the worst part is the lack of warning that you’ll be billed extra until it’s too late.
At the very least we need a “You will be billed $ per month for inviting this user” warning.
But really two paying users shouldn’t have to pay again to collaborate.
This is absurd, we are running into this problem too. I am out of seats on our account, but working with an external client that already has their own figma license. So we are both paying for figma, but can’t collaborate without paying for more than one license per user… That’s a scam. So, if we each want to collaborate on each others teams we’d be paying for four user licenses between the two of us.
Not saying anything different than others have… but I noticed this today because figma showed an upcoming bill despite me having recently paid for an annual account. I realized it’s because I added two editors to a project, but they are folks at another agency who have their own accounts. I don’t throw around the word scam much, but I must agree with others that it feels like a serious scam. It would make sense if you were inviting people who didn’t have their own accounts, and the cost implications were clear, but the fact that it just happens no matter their account status is bananas.
I’m an indy consultant needing to work with one other person for some client work coming up so I’m doing the workaround by creating a new free team separate from my pro account team . Once we’ve done our work I’m going to copy/paste the relevant bits to my pro team/file to share with the client.
Don’t need any of the pro features for this body of work so in my case the workaround does the job needed.
Doesn’t solve the core problem here and doesn’t work in many other use cases, but for those like me I thought I’d reiterate the workaround.
Ya’ll in this thread are badaces. Keep changing the game and making it happen.
I can’t imagine the bills. No response from Figma after months, is this Adobe spirit?