I guess people who want to avoid paying will start packing more frames into a file now? I wonder if there's a limit to how many things you can put into one file...
(EDIT: Someone mentioned it below - you're limited to 3 "pages" per file now. I guess that means 3 frames.)
Also, I am using the starter and created a Team to work on stuff with my friend. Will the limitations affect our team project which already has more than 3 files?
Oh, I see it in the article now:
> These changes don't apply to files created before April 21, 2021, only files you create after this date.
This starts shifting from a "free vs paid tools" question to a "how I do business" question. If the pricing for something critical is so high it's not practical, it's time to do some hard evaluations.
Edit: from practical experience, I've worked regularly with someone who will spend a lot of energy to avoid paying for things. That can result in hoop jumping just to accomplish things that should be quick and simple.
Edit2: also be wary of trying to get paid by people who aggressively work to not pay for things.
It's also the volume of tools that keep moving to subscription models. There are only so many tools I can rent. Especially for apps that I download, Jetbrains have the best model for this as I keep the version that I paid for, but they keep releasing updates that are actually worthwhile to upgrade.
Then I have other things like GitKraken which should be a one time purchase for $15. I know it's not sexy pricing, but the subscription price is just too damn high when I have ever other tool trying to bill me every year with fundamentally no change.
It's a tradeoff and depends on part on whether it's a business tool or a physical one (for you). If business, perhaps it's time to raise rates; if personal then you're probably not their target market. It also depends on the value of your time and how much of that you spend working around subscription models.
Convincing my boss to buy a tool is one thing, even buying on an annual basis, but convincing them to subscribe to another service is completely different.
As I said, I have personally purchased the JetBrains All Product pack, and have worked places where they will buy it for developers. Charging rent for a tool like GitKraken is just crappy, but I guess thats the only way to make ongoing money for a tool that you struggle to add value to encourage upgrade purchases.
3 frames would be a pretty stark limitation. When Figma says “pages” I assume they are referring to their “page” object, which allows you to have multiple separate workspaces per document. Limiting documents without limiting pages would be too easy to work around, so it’s clear why they had to do it.
I'm an engineer, so presumably not the intended audience wrt Figma. I hate it. Hopefully changes to the free tier curtail adoption. Three big reasons:
- It's built around an un-cropped 2d view. Cute-sie and unique, I know. But sending teammates links in an un-cropped 2d expanse is hit or miss. All us working in it don't know where/what one another are referring to. We've taken to slacking screenshots and pretending it doesn't exist.
- It feels super heavy weight. Load the page and look at the network requests. It's seconds just to get a menu of projects. Jumping into a project takes just as long. I assume this has to do with them trying to do a bunch of collaboration stuff that's already done by better, more established products. Why is ms paint so complicated?
- It's super clumsy to search. For comparison look at storybooks -- searchable, cropped, focused on compose-able components. Very, very simple UI. I spend minutes hunting around Figma for a random design I need to attach to a PR description when I know the name of the component I'm looking for!
It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this opinion. As an engineer who consumed design work from figma, I hate it.
* Slow is an understatement. And huge. Like 100Mb to start working on a medium size design (~20 frames?)
* It's impossible to figure out what part of the design to code to. Like you said, the best way we figured out how to work is to take screenshots and export them.
* It's impossible to follow comments. We just take conversations to slack.
* There's no easy way to track design revisions. What's changed? Who knows?
I miss working with designers who use sketch. Even better, those who just send me a full versioned spec that I can review offline. Design changed? Just send me an updated spec? Figma design changed? I have no idea where to even start looking.
I wish my company would go back to Figma. Revisions are a nightmare; our project is young and designers change designs without ever notifying software engineers
Designers love it for some reason but as an engineer it's a pain in the ass
I second these points. I actually complained to our Head of UX about it a couple of weeks back.
I get a Figma link and it's generally to a massively zoomed out view of the whole canvas with a ton of different workflows/screenshots spread out on it. It's often very hard to know where to start, and when you zoom in its far too easy to find yourself in the middle of empty space with no clear idea where you are in relation to any of the designs.
Our designers seem to like it but I am not a fan because it's really ####ing hard for non-designers to collaborate with designers, provide feedback, etc.
I'm coming to this conversation late, but your pain points are almost exactly the same ones that inspired a side project of mine [1].
I'd love to hear of any more issues you have with Figma or your workflow in general.
What I'm working on is a web app that serves your project's Figma designs to a focused workspace where you can code them up. Different breakpoints, states, and specs are all right there, so there's no window switching and you never have to open Figma. And it notifies you of design updates.
Still a work in progress, but I hope to launch it later this year.
What I want is something like figma that is better abstracted for making scalable web designs and outputting better code - for instance figma has auto layouts which are nice, but the output css can just be a rule on the parent class that makes equal margins for all children, instead of the weird absolutely positioned css that comes out.
I don’t build web apps that just absolutely position everything on the page, there’s a document flow and I want my design app to express individual elements based on the relationships between them, not arbitrary drag and drop.
I got very scared that free users can only create 3 frames in each file, and only 3 files. But this is only for collaboration. If you've been using Figma solo, you can have unlimited frames, this change doesn't affect you.
> Drafts is becoming a personal space for work. In drafts, you’ll still have unlimited files, pages, and viewers. However, if you want to co-edit with others, you have to move the file to a team space.
> In the team space, we’re removing the two-editor limit, which means you'll now be able to collaborate more freely with unlimited editors. In order to introduce unlimited editors for free, we'll be adding a new maximum of three files in the team space. Each file will have a cap of three pages.
This comment needs to be higher. A strange amount of misinformation in the top comments, and phrasing that makes it sound like solo designers can now only make 3 projects (or the commenter who wrongly edited their comment suggesting that a "file" == a "frame").
> I got very scared that free users can only create 3 frames in each file, and only 3 files. But this is only for collaboration. If you've been using Figma solo, you can have unlimited frames, this change doesn't affect you.
There is no frame limit per document only a page limit.
As an aside lots of SaaS products seem to be going this way for monetization - free for "basic" use but pay for teams.
Which is fair enough, but the jump often is insane - free gives you X, Y, Z and you can do basic collaboration, but go from 3 to 4 or otherwise pass some arbitrary limit and you go from $free/month to $300/mo (as now EVERYONE needs the $20/mo plan, etc). It's often too big a gap to cross.
Better are the "pay for power users, the free plan can watch them do their thing" as that lets you slide in and slowly increase spend. (It's much easier to get corporate approval for $20/mo and then slowly increase that than to try to get approval for $300/mo out of the gate).
For various personal projects and nerd reasons, I would love to use the apps available for Airtable, but going from free to $20 is bonkers.
I don't need the 20GB or 50,000 records and a year of revision history. I only want the apps.
Why not have a $5/mo a-la-carte upgrade for the free plan where I could purchase app functionality or more records or more storage, depending on my needs and then going to $20 when/if it makes sense?
I expect “20GB or 50,000 records and a year of revision history” costs them peanuts relative to development of their tools, and certainly way less than $15 per month (that easily gets you 2TB at cloud providers)
If so, to come out even at $5 per user per month versus $20, I would guess they need more than four times the number of paid users (as more users means more support, and that costs money).
⇒ Dropping the price would be a big gamble. It may pay off, but if it doesn’t, it’s hard to increase prices again.
> (It's much easier to get corporate approval for $20/mo and then slowly increase that than to try to get approval for $300/mo out of the gate).
Might be the case for you, but definitely not true everywhere. Both of those numbers are well under the threshold for "needs more approval" at lot of companies.
Lots of marketing lingo in that post which obscures the real change – you can now only have 1 project, 3 files and 3 pages per file on a free account, down from unlimited.
I'm stupidly illiterate to online sarcasm without a /s involved, so if you're joking then my bad.
But, if you're not... You really don't know how to draw a rectangle? It's like the 4th icon in the top toolbar when you open a project. It's literally a square. With a tooltip that says "Shape Tools"... ._.
That was not sarcasm. I actually could not. I downloaded and tried to use Figma twice. Spent 10 minutes each time trying to draw a rectangle and failed miserably. I mean, I _can_ draw a rectangle. But the colours won't take effect. See in the screenshot below that I have a rectangle that should be filled with #C4C4C4 and stroked with black? Why doesn't my rectangle look grey with a black border?
I like Figma and it is a solid product. But one reason why my team will stay on Sketch is the unilateral ability of Figma's developers to change plans at will.
That's the reason I try to stay away from SaaS in general. When I do, I try to have an "exit strategy" like keeping a markdown backup of all my Notion pages.
Sketch is a normal desktop app which works offline. Updates require a subscription, but you can keep using your last version forever.
You open Figma at all without an internet connection—even if you’ve saved an offline copy of a project—so you’re completely at their mercy for any work you create.
I missed this when first reading their site. It seems that they're really pushing for the $9/month subscription – the old 12 months of updates pricing is in the small print below a huge box selling their subscription.
Maybe they too are moving in that direction? I wouldn't blame them.
That's why I prefer JetBrain's version. You pay for the product you get. That's it. Simple and done. You can benefit from updates for a year, and if you pay for another year, you get to keep those benefits. But at the end of the day, you get exactly what you pay for.
Yeah, that's one of the things that, sadly, feels almost surreal these days. Their products are packed with features, they let you keep your old versions, there are discounts for students and loyal customers and open-source projects and even without any discount the prices are very reasonable for such an important part of my workflow.
It's the only subscription where I'd happily attach a "Thank You" note to the money.
I'm just curious -- I don't recall any high-profile dev getting screwed over by JetBrains, was there ever a case like that?
sounds like UaaS (upgrade as a service). sounds nice. any cons?
it seems to me like a company might try to withhold some features until the next release so you upgrade. Or is that expected out the gate and any "updates for a year" are just for bugs?
Jetbrains seems to take a broader view of life. They do lots of things that don't immediately benefit them. For example, their open source Rust plugin gets new features much more often than once a year, and I'm not even paying for it.
It would be quite challenging to make such a business model work with collaboration-centric features. Features such as multiplayer editing, in addition to requiring some carefully designed technology, require the two clients to be running the same version of the code. As soon as you introduce a new feature -- e.g. a new type of object that you can insert into the document, you need all clients connected to the same file to be able to understand that object.
This is just one of many types of edge cases that can crop up. It's kind of like database migrations except a lot of work happens client-side too.
You could put the onus on the user to deal with making sure everyone you're sharing a file with has the same version (or whatever asset is involved in a particular tool, this is not design-tool specific). But the friction to sharing raises considerably. Even if your whole team is on the same version, what happens if you try to share a file with an external client, etc. You'll be making tons of tradeoffs in engineering time and feature design to deal with the fact that users don't get the latest version of your app just by loading the page. Your tool, though it might still be excellent in other regards, probably won't end up having collaboration as a central selling point.
With Sketch, the 'cons' are that if you withhold from upgrading, then after some time the app will get increasingly less useful: plugins are generally supported only for the latest version, and it is rare when you can get old versions of plugins. Design resources too always seem to be available for the latest versions only. So if you work completely independently from external world, it migth not affect you much, but if you are not, it is cheaper to buy upgrades. Maybe not every 12 months, but every 18 months or so.
But anyway Sketch is that good that we pay it's price gladly.
The main feature that pushes my projects from Starter to Professional is Sharing Libraries, aka Component Publishing. It was never possible in drafts or Starter teams, so these changes don't really do much.
Due to the way their prototyping works (not allowing links between pages), I almost always work from one file and one page. Extra limits don't change much.
I’m a Figma user and this is all way too complicated for me. I have no idea what any of this means, I just want designers to be able to share their mock-ups with me. I don’t particularly care about a mock-up from a few months ago. I wish I could just pay $20/month per user in my organization and call it a day. If I work with an external agency, I shouldn’t have to pay them extra.
TLDR;
We want to get free users to move to paid plans sooner, by (a) relaxing sharing limits, and (b) reducing the amount of pages you can create to 3 unless you upgrade.
Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.
Catch all the users very early, grow quickly with VC capital, give the users whatever they want and then later force them to pay up by limiting access to the tools they love. - Silicon Valley VC Playbook.
As an employee (not of Figma I mean of VC backed companies in general) it's also frustrating because you join based on some vision and then you often end up hating the feature throttling for philosophical (empathy with users) or practical reasons (makes it harder to sell or market if that's your job)
Remember when products were getting better over time... now their value starts meh (MVP), becomes great (thanks to funding), and then reverts to meh (when finally focusing on unit economics)
A little off topic, but given its popularity I gave Figma an honest try for my last UI design. I tried to like it, I wanted to like it.
But after 15+ years of using Illustrator, I felt so constrained. It felt like 15% of the feature set of Illustrator.
I wonder who the target is? People who work on teams probably get more out of it. Or if you design front ends by dragging and dropping predesigned elements from libraries like Material?
Illustrator is an illustration tool. Even Adobe is pushing XD. Figma has thoroughly taken over the web design space. Every company and agency I've worked with in the past 5 years are on the bandwagon. And before that it was Sketch and before that it was mostly Photoshop which was also a very mismatched tool.
I used with a design agency on my current project. Have to say, I was very satisfied by the feature set, considering the output is generally the same as what can be made easily using a common toolset (ie. html/css, it even gives you the CSS when you highlight a component)
It's not a photoshop/illustrator replacement, but I think the agency imported some of the more 'complicated' SVGs and such from another editor.
I've been designing UIs for 15 years, from Photoshop 6.0 to Sketch to Figma. I LOVE Figma. It makes it easy to do things that will be easier to develop, and makes it much harder to do things that "break" layout rules. End result is more consistent UIs, clearer component structure in code, and much happier developers.
* The number of those files is now capped at 3 with 3 pages each, down from unlimited
* Draft files (of which you can have an unlimited number) can no longer have any editors besides you