[LAUNCHED] All plans should offer more than 4 variable modes

Thanks for the feedback, @RizePoint_Product!

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!

This kind of business model is never a good idea, and just comes across as greedy?

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!