Dev mode pricing

I agree with you and also created a similar topic giving the idea about a dev only seat. Because yes, most of the Editor/Full seats features are useless for them. Also, in my specific case we don’t want to give them the chance to edit anything of the design, only inspect it, but the Dev Mode is only available in the Editors seat?

To answeryou question ,there is a dev seat wich is in enterprise. It’s a new option alon side the Figma editor, the FigJam and the dev mode.

In enterprise the dev mode is 35$/month for A devs to be able to inspect a handhoff.

But not sure to understand why inspecting cost half of the full editor price and 7 times more expensive than FigJam…

Right, but maybe is better to have the option in pro too

I did a short math on this and it resulted in the following:
if we have 5 developers on our team and we have the Organisation subscription that will cost for us 5xDevelopers x $25/month = $1500/year.

This is ridiculously expensive for just seeing some sizes, padding and hexcodes etc.
Maybe this will be a reason to switch back to ADobe XD. lol.

Within the last year the team that I work for adopted Figma after many months of negotiations with senior leadership in the broader company.

Watching config when dev mode was announced shortly thereafter was like a proverbial gut punch. We had just won the fight to get designers paid seats, so seeing that this functionality is hidden behind a paywall was a reality that came all to fast. There is no way we will get developer seats here. It’s just reality. (I understand the justification for charging a licensing fee, don’t get me wrong!)

There are certainly benefits to dev mode for smaller orgs and startups, but in an enterprise environment where a functioning DSM and component library exists, the cost is not worth it from an engineering perspective. And I would hate to lose the collaboration and efficiency gains that come with building prototypes in Figma.

So I guess this is a plea to the Figma team (and a plea to anyone reading this! please provide feedback if you’re dealing with a similar reality!) to reconsider the pricing of dev mode. Or offer a “basic” version that is similar to what inspect used to be, so we can continue to use the software without a large cost increase. I may be a bit bold in saying this, but I anticipate we wouldn’t be the only enterprise/organizational company that would be forced to find other software if inspect mode is stripped to nothing and dev mode licensing is forced to keep the same functionality ☹

Hi! Avantika from the Figma Product team here 👋🏾

I really appreciate your feedback about this and I’d love to share a few things that might help. We do have a “basic” version of the old inspect panel available for free to all your developers, although the way they access these features is slightly different. I put together a gallery of visuals which helps visually show the differences. They will still be able to inspect the file via the properties tab, get measurements, export assets, and now will access code snippets from the context menu. Would this serve the needs of the developers in your organization?

Totally hear where you’re coming from around dev mode being less useful in an Enterprise environment. If it helps, we have ways for Dev Mode to integrate with your design system and component library. Here’s a great example from Razorpay where they’ve created a Dev Mode plugin to show the component code from their design system) and a few other ideas in the works, so stay tuned!

Let me know what you think! We definitely want to ensure that you can continue to collaborate with developers even if your organization doesn’t have the budget for Dev Mode.

Avantika

@agomes Thanks for the reply.

We got a similar issue at our company and we’re also using the enterprise license. There is no way we get dev seats on top of the design seats (see my post for more info). It was not easy to convince our managers to switch to Figma and with the expensive dev mode we now have to use the free version but the free version is not advanced enough. So I fear we will have another discussion soon to switch from Figma to another tool…

You’re right that devs will still be able to inspect the file via the properties tab, get measurements, export assets, and access code snippets from the context menu but the way the properties tab is structured and how elements are selected in the canvas makes it useless. The important part of the dev mode is this one + the easy way to select elements on the canvas:

You guys should really consider making the basic dev mode more advanced/similar to the image above or make the paid version way cheaper.

What I don’t understand is how the dev seat cost scales so much when functionality doesn’t. An Enterprise account already pays an exorbitant price for designers, and I understand that for the company it may have added bonuses in security and account control, but these should be on a fixed price per account instead of seatings when they don’t bring as many improvements to the designers themselves (besides 40 modes).

I have been pushing for our company to fully adopt Figma and update their license so we can have more control over our design system (right now we still use Sketch + Zeplin for UI design), but I can’t excuse the huge price increase that it would bring.

Figma Dev mode is charged, the organizational version is $25/person/month, the enterprise version is $35/person/month, and the professional version does not have a dedicated dev seat, so you need to buy an editor seat. Moreover, the Properties panel has been cut a lot and is almost unusable.
This price is too expensive for a small team. According to our team of 5 people, $25512 is $1500 a year! Our boss is looking for an alternative that is compatible with Figma.

Hi, I share the same feeling. We had a year of negociation internally to get a tool for all designer across our org and it was not easy.
We’re still in battle for FigJam… and this only for designers.

Now there is a will to charge also Devs where Figma is not their main activity application.
It was already hard to get the tool for designers if Devs had the budget to have tools for themself, they would never spend it into Figma but more something related to their Job.

I know there are a lot of plugin that could do things, but I feel it is not adapted to big enterprises where all code need to be done in a specific way and have a strict process.

The price paying 35$ to be able to see the paddings and margins on roll hover of the UI is quiet a price. I’m sure Zeplin could do better in that area. Not at your level, but penpot has it right now for free…

It would be better to focus on empowering people who create and produce something with your application rather than making devs pay for inspect and using a tool that they don’t like (sorry that’s the case of almost all the devs in my company)

Be carreful on your position and how things continue and not losing our trust.
Like:

• Will you chage 35$ when the AI will be finalized?
• Will you made the viewer paid 35 because it’s UX researcher not designers?