We want to use it to link design variables to the design tokens in our application.
Our company runs on a Professional plan. There are only 10 users that need access, so we don’t have any need to go to an Organization or Enterprise.
I saw the same question here, but it wasn’t answered and just pointed to the Plugin API which has an entirely different use case.
Why the Variables API is only available on enterprise plans?
cause money 
It’s strange because all of the other REST API endpoints are available cross-plans.
Thanks @Gleb 
not all, on enterprise plan they also have rest apis for managing access (not sure if it’s public or not yet but this was announced)
I also agree it should be at least an organisation endpoint. It makes the full variables feature pointless when it comes to communicate with developers as it’s not even visible in Dev mode…
Is there any intention to change this once this gets out of Beta?
I’m also curious to know. Restricting this API to Enterprise customers only (not even Organization!) diminishes significantly the value of this feature for small/mid-size teams.
Not to mention that it completely alienates solo Design Ops consultants like me from building CI/CD pipelines for my small/mid-size clients.
I honestly don’t know what Figma are playing at with locking key variables features behind enterprise plans 
It’s the same with the 4 modes restriction… Variables is available to everyone, yet if you want to actually make use it of in the relationship between designer → developer → product, you have to pay Figma for enterprise?! We’re 4 designers in a company of 25, we are not an enterprise company…
To make variables useful to the mid-tier companies, modes needs to be bumped up to at least 8 in org and allow variables REST API in org too. Otherwise, it’s useless to most medium-sized companies. Greedy on Figma’s part…
I’m 1000% with @jackbrind on this one
Same here! Small product agency but we love using design tokens as a bridge between design and dev.
I’m kind of hoping this comes to all plans once variables are out of beta…
Yeah this is super disappointing.
We’re a small team of 4 and we can’t sync variables between design and code without using some sort of clunky export workflow or build our own plugin, just to grab the variables.
I would like to add my voice to this. I don’t see how this is helping Figmas goals. By constraining Figmas ability to integrate deeply into delivery pipelines it is impeding Figmas stickiness. Its creating a situation where customers must first become big enough to be enterprise before they are able to integrate Figma into their CI. Surely it is better for Figma to get deeply embedded into product delivery as early as possible. This, in turn, will help their customers be successful, grow and ultimately become enterprise customers.
Also chiming in that this seems to make more sense on organization level - I think this would be hugely useful and still very separate to our needs across organization and enterprise plans.
This really needs to be implemented. Managing the transition & syncing of variables from Figma to Dev is clunky without this API. Doesn’t feel like this should be gated for smaller teams - if anything it would encourage Figma use and embed the dev team more within the product. Really hope they change this.
So, I understand why they would want to lock down the ability to write variables, as that is a pretty juicy feature and genuinely solves a difficult problem.
but really?? I can’t even make a simple GET request to read my variables from remote. Absolutely wild
I was excited to see that I could build a dynamic component documentation with the file api, this turned into sadness after realizing that a crucial part of our design system was hidden behind the enterprise plan for arbitrary reasons.
I guess the “solution” for non-enterprise folks is to create copies of every component for every variable mode, exponentially increasing the load of the file api.
@m.trenker I just had the same experience and I am going throught the coping stages right now: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance
Discovering that this feature is enterprise only was also very frustrating for our team because we explored to shift our design system towards variables, but without the REST API it lost almost all it’s usefulness and thus design variables didn’t get adopted at all.
