8 ms·

Figma: Changes to free plan after April 21, 2021

125 points by seanwilson 6y ago

apapli 6y ago
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.
- TheCapeGreek 6y ago
  *Unlimited draft files For solo people using Figma this shouldn't affect them too much, but naturally those are likely fewer than teams/collaborators.
- rvz 6y ago
  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.
  - mguerville 6y ago
    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)
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
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.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Why doesn't this issue apply to Sketch?
  - flixic 6y ago
    You can keep using your last paid version forever.
    - danpalmer 6y ago
      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.
      - jasonlotito 6y ago
        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.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        devmunchies 6y ago
        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?
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        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.
granzymes 6y ago
* Files can now have an unlimited number of editors, up from 2 * 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
- wayneftw 6y ago
  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. Looks like we're going to have to start paying :)
  - shivenigma 6y ago
    Existing files will stay unaffected as far as I understood.
  - martin-adams 6y ago
    Can you create lots of files now as placeholders and use them after the changeover date?
    - fencepost 6y ago
      [can we work around these new charges] 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.
user3939382 6y ago
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?
- darkcha0s 6y ago
  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.
- flixic 6y ago
  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.
- tootie 6y ago
  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.
- scarecrowbob 6y ago
  It is substantially easier for me as a developer to get information out of the document and into a template.
paxys 6y ago
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.
- flixic 6y ago
  On a Starter team. Drafts are still unlimited.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Starter = free, so yes. And drafts were always unlimited, now they can't have collaborators.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      What's the difference between drafts and other files? 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.
- jasonlotito 6y ago
  https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061769534#Compare_changes https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061769534#Compar... Seems fairly clear and concise.
flixic 6y ago
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. So, whatever. More editors, good.
- lobstrosity420 6y ago
  Not allowing liks between pages is really annoying, and makes pages near useless to me. I wonder if they have any plans to implement that.
  - davidivadavid 6y ago
    Dynamic components solve part of that problem, and you can work around it by organizing your pages differently. Would be nice, though.
denysvitali 6y ago
Figma is cool, and I still can't believe that such a good product is free. Big kudos to them! 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 https://github.com/denysvitali/dev-portal-designs
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  I couldn't even figure out how to draw a rectangle in Figma. Kudos to you!
  - stuffbyspencer 6y ago
    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"... ._.
    - SwiftyBug 6y ago
      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? https://imgur.com/TTrOC4S https://imgur.com/TTrOC4S
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  It is far from free if you are doing serious work with it.
  - denysvitali 6y ago
    With a free account you can basically create a lot of content and export it in a vectorized format. Far better than the competition I would say. 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
bombcar 6y ago
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).
- edoceo 6y ago
  > arbitrary limit I'm sure they do resource, cost analysis and basically chart out a few breakpoints
- bradstewart 6y ago
  > (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.
- bryanmgreen 6y ago
  Airtable is like this and it's frankly insane. 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?
  - Someone 6y ago
    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.
the100rabh 6y ago
Just wondering if anyone uses something other than figma these days. Is there any viable competitor to them?
throw14082020 6y ago
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. https://www.figma.com/blog/about-figmas-new-starter-plan/ https://www.figma.com/blog/about-figmas-new-starter-plan/ This is a nicer document than the original one
- stuffbyspencer 6y ago
  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"). This really just effects collaboration.
- httpsterio 6y ago
  > 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.
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    Yes I realized after I discovered a top comment was wrongly guessing: > you're limited to 3 "pages" per file now. I guess that means 3 frames. I couldn't edit the comment
rgifford 6y ago
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!
- fassssst 6y ago
  Yea it’s a useful tool but the UI gets super slow for larger projects. And I dread opening Figma files now with my Comcast data cap.
  - hrpnk 6y ago
    One project I had read access to was ca. 100MB as PDF export. Neither Figma nor evince could render this project well without eating up GBs of RAM.
- 16bytes 6y ago
  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.
xmly 6y ago
Still good one to use.
kickscondor 6y ago
So I use Figma exclusive as... a chat client! I don't think I can go back to normal chat. https://twitter.com/kickscondor/status/1373639637814575104 https://twitter.com/kickscondor/status/1373639637814575104 These changes mean no more free chats. But it's probably time for me to pony up anyway.
TechBro8615 6y ago
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.

125 points by seanwilson 6y ago

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.

TheCapeGreek 6y ago
*Unlimited draft files For solo people using Figma this shouldn't affect them too much, but naturally those are likely fewer than teams/collaborators.
rvz 6y ago
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.
- mguerville 6y ago
  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)

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

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.

danpalmer 6y ago
Why doesn't this issue apply to Sketch?
- flixic 6y ago
  You can keep using your last paid version forever.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    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.
    - jasonlotito 6y ago
      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.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - devmunchies 6y ago
        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?
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        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.

granzymes 6y ago

* Files can now have an unlimited number of editors, up from 2 * 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

wayneftw 6y ago
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. Looks like we're going to have to start paying :)
- shivenigma 6y ago
  Existing files will stay unaffected as far as I understood.
- martin-adams 6y ago
  Can you create lots of files now as placeholders and use them after the changeover date?
  - fencepost 6y ago
    [can we work around these new charges] 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.

user3939382 6y ago

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?

darkcha0s 6y ago
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.
flixic 6y ago
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.
tootie 6y ago
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.
scarecrowbob 6y ago
It is substantially easier for me as a developer to get information out of the document and into a template.

paxys 6y ago

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.

flixic 6y ago
On a Starter team. Drafts are still unlimited.
- paxys 6y ago
  Starter = free, so yes. And drafts were always unlimited, now they can't have collaborators.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    What's the difference between drafts and other files? 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.
jasonlotito 6y ago
https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061769534#Compare_changes https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061769534#Compar... Seems fairly clear and concise.

flixic 6y ago

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. So, whatever. More editors, good.

lobstrosity420 6y ago
Not allowing liks between pages is really annoying, and makes pages near useless to me. I wonder if they have any plans to implement that.
- davidivadavid 6y ago
  Dynamic components solve part of that problem, and you can work around it by organizing your pages differently. Would be nice, though.

denysvitali 6y ago

Figma is cool, and I still can't believe that such a good product is free. Big kudos to them! 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 https://github.com/denysvitali/dev-portal-designs

SwiftyBug 6y ago
I couldn't even figure out how to draw a rectangle in Figma. Kudos to you!
- stuffbyspencer 6y ago
  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"... ._.
  - SwiftyBug 6y ago
    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? https://imgur.com/TTrOC4S https://imgur.com/TTrOC4S
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
It is far from free if you are doing serious work with it.
- denysvitali 6y ago
  With a free account you can basically create a lot of content and export it in a vectorized format. Far better than the competition I would say. 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

bombcar 6y ago

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).

edoceo 6y ago
> arbitrary limit I'm sure they do resource, cost analysis and basically chart out a few breakpoints
bradstewart 6y ago
> (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.
bryanmgreen 6y ago
Airtable is like this and it's frankly insane. 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?
- Someone 6y ago
  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.

the100rabh 6y ago

Just wondering if anyone uses something other than figma these days. Is there any viable competitor to them?

throw14082020 6y ago

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. https://www.figma.com/blog/about-figmas-new-starter-plan/ https://www.figma.com/blog/about-figmas-new-starter-plan/ This is a nicer document than the original one

stuffbyspencer 6y ago
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"). This really just effects collaboration.
httpsterio 6y ago
> 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.
- throw14082020 6y ago
  Yes I realized after I discovered a top comment was wrongly guessing: > you're limited to 3 "pages" per file now. I guess that means 3 frames. I couldn't edit the comment

rgifford 6y ago

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!

fassssst 6y ago
Yea it’s a useful tool but the UI gets super slow for larger projects. And I dread opening Figma files now with my Comcast data cap.
- hrpnk 6y ago
  One project I had read access to was ca. 100MB as PDF export. Neither Figma nor evince could render this project well without eating up GBs of RAM.
16bytes 6y ago
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.

xmly 6y ago

Still good one to use.

kickscondor 6y ago

So I use Figma exclusive as... a chat client! I don't think I can go back to normal chat. https://twitter.com/kickscondor/status/1373639637814575104 https://twitter.com/kickscondor/status/1373639637814575104 These changes mean no more free chats. But it's probably time for me to pony up anyway.

TechBro8615 6y ago

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.