Famous Web Design Software Company Figma Finally Modified Their Billing Permissions
5U® Website, as a local small business in Vancouver, has been committed to providing excellent UX/UI design services to local merchants. While our capabilities and experience cannot compare to superstar companies like Figma, we are thrilled that Figma finally listened to our feedback after our continuous reporting of billing issues and modified their billing permission management system, completely solving a billing control problem that has long troubled business managers.
The core of this issue lies in unreasonable permission management design. For small and medium businesses in Vancouver, every dollar in the budget needs to be carefully calculated, especially when purchasing technical tools. However, Figma's previous billing mechanism caused business managers to lose complete control over costs. Before this modification, business owners purchased Figma's paid licenses for their teams (just like we purchase productivity tool licenses for Slack and Dropbox), allowing UX/UI designers in the team to better provide professional user experience design services to clients. However, unlike other tech companies, we discovered that any paid Figma user in the team could randomly invite others to become paid users (and subsequently each paid user could invite others to become paid users as well), while the company had to pay bills for all these users and had absolutely no way to prevent this behavior.
Out-of-Control Web Design Tool Costs
The impact of this issue is far more serious than it appears on the surface. In our web design service process, we often encounter situations requiring collaboration with clients, external consultants, or temporary partners. For example, designers need client marketing and legal departments to review new website design drafts and provide feedback. According to reasonable logic, these external collaborators only need viewing permissions and don't need to become paid users at all. However, under Figma's previous design mechanism, designers could accidentally invite members from the other party's team directly as paid users with editing permissions, while business managers remained completely unaware. Once these accounts were invited and activated, fees would continue to generate, even if the other party only used read-only permissions for ten minutes - we would still need to pay for these services every month until we discovered it.
Continuous Feedback for User Experience and Our Wallets
After discovering this problem, the 5U® team decided to take action. We first needed to confirm whether this issue was caused by our improper settings. If it was due to settings that allowed everyone on our team to invite others to become paid users, we could simply turn off this setting. However, after thoroughly exploring the documentation and Figma settings, we realized this billing problem was beyond our control.
So, starting in early 2023, we began providing feedback to Figma officially about this issue, detailing the difficulties enterprise users encountered in actual use. We provided specific screenshots and usage scenario descriptions, showing that even the highest-privilege administrators of enterprise accounts couldn't effectively control team members' invitation behavior. Initially, Figma's customer service team didn't seem to fully understand the severity of this problem. Their replies were often formulaic template explanations, suggesting we use existing permission setting features. However, we had already discovered through detailed testing that these so-called permission setting features couldn't truly solve the problem. As professional Vancouver UX/UI design service providers and experts in UX and UI ourselves, we deeply understand that user experience is not only reflected in interface design but also in every aspect of the entire product usage process. An excellent design tool should perform equally well in enterprise-level functions like billing management and permission control. Figma's approach at the time was vastly different from other paid software purchasing methods. Other companies (such as Slack, Dropbox, Google Workspace...) very clearly and explicitly defined that only administrator-level users could purchase new licenses, even decide license levels, subscription methods (annual or monthly), and update payment information, while Figma gave the "purchasing" decision power to every user with editing permissions, leaving the bills to the enterprise.
We raised objections to Figma about this permission setting. This simply didn't conform to a normal enterprise procurement process. Figma took this problem very seriously. Although they couldn't solve it immediately, they still listened to our views on this issue and considered improvements for the future.
The Power of Persistence: Driving Product Improvement from a User Perspective
Over the following year-plus, we maintained continuous communication with Figma. Whenever we encountered the same problem again, we would contact and provide feedback to Figma once more. Meanwhile, we also noticed that many people on sites like Reddit were complaining about Figma's billing collection methods. The biggest issues were "the person paying had no idea the account generated additional fees" and "these fees were actually completely avoidable." We even saw users abandon Figma purely because of this charging model. Although our daily work had become inseparable from Figma (we must say, their design tools are indeed excellent), we believed that as a professional team dealing with website design tools and user experience projects daily, our opinions also had important reference value. After all, true user experience optimization requires feedback from actual usage scenarios, not theoretical design behind closed doors.
This process also gave us a deep understanding of the importance of product feedback, and when providing services, we became more proactive in listening to clients' ideas and even improvement solutions. Often, software development companies might temporarily shelve users' reasonable demands due to technical implementation complexity, business model considerations, or cost concerns. However, continuous, well-reasoned feedback can ultimately drive positive change. After all, this will ultimately bring them more long-term benefits.
Resolution: Reasonable Expectations for Product Design Were Finally Met
Not long ago, we finally saw the long-awaited change. Figma completely redesigned the permission management system for enterprise accounts in their latest update, making business managers the only ones with authority to decide account purchases and invitations. This change not only solved enterprise cost control problems but also greatly improved customer satisfaction for clients like us. As the story develops, web design companies using Figma in Vancouver and worldwide are beneficiaries of this update. And Figma will certainly win more customers because of this change, with a more reasonable billing permission management system.
This success story strengthens our belief that excellent product design requires genuine feedback from users. Figma, as a design tool giant with a valuation approaching $20 billion, ultimately chose to listen to feedback from real users like us and make changes, reflecting a truly user-centered UX/UI design culture. This also explains why Figma can maintain its leading position in the competitive design tool market and become the preferred tool for UX/UI designers worldwide.
This case also demonstrates the value of continuous feedback and communication. Many local businesses encountering problems when using tech tools and software often choose to suffer silently or switch to other tools rather than actively provide feedback about problems. In fact, many things that exist in this world are unreasonable and need change. For example, almost all software has bugs that need regular patching, and people who discover these bugs and provide feedback to developers are not disliked by developers - instead, they are the greatest contributors to product progress.
Of course, not all feedback receives effective responses. For example, almost all large companies, for commercial interests, hide human customer service entries deeper and deeper. Also, some system designs, while anti-human, are difficult to change due to historical reasons, such as the keyboard configuration we use daily, or passwords - an authorization method we use every day but is actually very unfriendly to humans. However, when you encounter unreasonable design or product experiences, you should proactively suggest improvements to developers. Although the 5U®team is small, we have so far provided improvement suggestions to many internet companies, and we've found that most excellent products have authors who are very willing to listen to user feedback, humbly accept real problems, and make improvements. Even when problems we raise are caused by our improper usage, they are very willing to explain correct usage methods, ultimately earning our respect and heartfelt support.
