Can a file be edited by an account from another team without charging the owner team?

Editors are billed on the file/account level. So if you invite someone to a file you own as an editor they will be billed on your account. If they own a different file and add you as an editor, then they will be billed for that editor seat.

Hopefully that makes sense.
This article might be helpful as well: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040328273-Plans-and-teams-in-Figma#Professional_team

I understand the answer, but that’s not how the agencies world works.
Would you like me to ask a client to pay me an account for the work I’m going to produce for them???
I don’t pay for the tools my carpenter will use, it’s his investment.

Also, many clients are won by call of tenders, so my production started before we even talked about money?

I know that I can transfer the ownership but it isn’t acceptable to ask a client to pay for my account. As it is not acceptable to pay for the employees of my clients…

To my mind, a figma’s pro account must be allowed to edit a file belonging to another figma’s pro account. Both are paying figma, it’s just a matter of sharing permissions.

Does the client need to have edit access? If not then you could be the owner of the file, adding them as viewers, and then transferring ownership once the project is done.

It’s also possible to create a new free starter team which is limited to 2 editors. This would allow you to work with the client in a separate space with them as an editor for free. (as long as you don’t need more than two editors)

this model makes things so difficult!
sure, there might be hacks around it, but it just makes no sense.
each user can get billed multiple times because they collaborate with different teams?
it makes no sense for agencies or freelancers.
if i am a freelancer and i want to work with different colleagues on different projects, i have to pay a seat for each of them?!
on top of the seat that they already pay?!

I am also questioning this model. Paying editor in one team should be able to edit file that is shared from another team, without double-charging. When I buy for instance Adobe Illustrator and I send .ai file to someone who also bought adobe illustrator, the will be able to edit the file.

Just figured that out too and can confirm it’s a real pain as a freelancer to need to pay for their editor seat because they want to make copy change themselves for example. Something could be improved on that matter.

Even trying to run a team with multiple designers is a mess. You start trying to give them rights to edit their one small piece of a rather large pie and you end up getting billed the same amount you would for having them do the whole thing. This business model is a mess.

The Figma member, permission, and billing logic is driving us crazy…

As an agency, we always have to provide edit rights of a file to the client and our partners but not only viewing. In the workflow, we sometimes would like to invite external members to help contribute to some part of the task.

Sharing edit right of a file = getting billed
Does it make sense?

And on the client’s side, the same problem happens to them. They want to OWN a file and share editing with us. But they face that similar problem as well.

Figma’s current model is not facilitating co-working across teams and organizations at all.

Please consider how it works in Google Docs and Adobe XD.

Hey Guys,
A design studio here, and we are facing the same challenge!
We’ve sort of come to a solution, which is the same as @Josh suggested above.
We create a project in a starter team, where we invite the client to edit this “shared file”. Obviously, this is not the file where we work as a team in the studio. We have a source of truth file in our “Figma Team” where we use the team libraries and others features. And we go back and forth with those two files.
We hope this would help 🙌🏾

I understand but… meeeeeeehhhh… 😰

This business model is very strange… Having to pay for my client’s access to a project that I own doesn’t make sense. If both parties have professional accounts, they should be able to access each other’s files without extra charge. This forces me to only give view access to clients, which is not ideal.

And… huge design assets safety issue as well 😧

1. To delete a file, just need to hit “delete” key
2. Deleted files will go to the trash bin of the account who delete it ?!?!

When clients, external partners, or even internal staff, leaving staff want to delete a file (accidentally or deliberately), it is not possible to get back the file.

Such design assets should be team’s and company’s valuable assets, there should be a way to protect or to retrieve them by team admin account.

Honestly, this has to get resolved. It is an awful model and causes confusion. I don’t see a lot of responses from Support here. Can someone provide a solution or way to share files with clients.

We need this feature so bad:(

I understand the problem in that a team could “invite” team members for free on every project that the team has made without needing to pay for the team members that was “invited to edit”. What if there is a system for “guest accounts”? The team would pay for a discounted price of 50%, so that each project would have an extra “guest” edit account that we can give to other email addresses. These guests would not have any extra “Team” benefits other than infinite pages on that specific project.

I think this will bring forth more cashflow for figma, as rather than making another team that is used for edit access with clients.

Freelance designer here. I wasn’t aware Figma operated this method until I was billed for it in arrears after sharing work with a client. Quite frustrating. At a minimum better messaging is needed.

This is really a pain in the as, that should be improved. My client has a account too and pays for it. So we both end up paying twice?

We currently use UX Pin and were potentially looking to switch over to Figma. There is a feature in UX Pin where you can share a prototype in preview mode and share with anyone without a login and they can leave comments. There is also an option to view specs so developers can user it as well. This is all done without having to log in. I was trying to find a way around it so we could switch to Figma, but from what I have read online this is an on going issue for designers with this tool. I would highly recommend Figma make some changes to its program to make it easy for designers to share their projects to clients and developers without logging in.

Really looking for a solution to this. Our agency is paying for 50+ editors per month, half of whom are client stakeholders who need to be able to edit our files (or access Figma Inspect). This isn’t a sustainable model for us as we grow our agency and work with more clients. $1000+ per month is very tough. I would love an update to the billing model – at minimum, I would expect Figma Organization to have a solution for this. It would at least make the 3x price increase from Professional more palatable for smaller agency organizations.

As an agency we’re also in the situation of having a $850 bill land on us because every client we’ve shared with has been charged to us!

This all feels deliberately confusing. At no point were our designers warned that adding editors to their files would result in the company being automatically charged.

It’s a great product but this is something I wouldn’t even think Adobe would try to get away with.

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.

Yes…
That’s really not making sense.

A tool like Figma should promote collaboration, but the billing model now is not and just a mess with climbing costs.

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.