Figma: Changes to free plan after April 21, 2021
help.figma.com
help.figma.com
* 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
(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.
Looks like we're going to have to start paying :)
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.
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.
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.
I believe you can still have unlimited frames.
- 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!
* 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.
Designers love it for some reason but as an engineer it's a pain in the ass
Because they need to load the entire editor into the page. Compare that to Sketch, or Photoshop, or any other tool.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
https://www.figma.com/blog/about-figmas-new-starter-plan/
This is a nicer document than the original one
This really just effects collaboration.
There is no frame limit per document only a page limit.
I couldn't edit the comment
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).
I'm sure they do resource, cost analysis and basically chart out a few breakpoints
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.
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?
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.
I use Figma casually as a non-designer and I have a bunch of drafts and a bunch of other files. No clue what the difference is.
Seems fairly clear and concise.
This is something that I've done with Figma, mind that I'm not a graphic designer and this was my first use of Figma: https://github.com/denysvitali/dev-portal-designs
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"... ._.
Illustrator isn't free either, but AFAIK it doesn't even have a free version that lets you do 1/4 of the features of Figma.
Of course for the nice things you still have to pay, but I would argue that Figma already gives a lot of free features away
Maybe they too are moving in that direction? I wouldn't blame them.
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?
But anyway Sketch is that good that we pay it's price gladly.
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.
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?
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 find it quite scary.
Until the next version changes the file format again, and it's incompatible with the version you're using.
IIRC this happened in Sketch 2 -> Sketch 3.
Oh, yes. We need more people talking and doing that. A SAAS with no "readable" export option is a major no for me.
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.
So, whatever. More editors, good.
https://twitter.com/kickscondor/status/1373639637814575104
These changes mean no more free chats. But it's probably time for me to pony up anyway.
Existing work created prior to 21 April will be unaffected.
For solo people using Figma this shouldn't affect them too much, but naturally those are likely fewer than teams/collaborators.
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)
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?
It's not a photoshop/illustrator replacement, but I think the agency imported some of the more 'complicated' SVGs and such from another editor.