In just eight years the rise of Figma from scrappy upstart to industry giant is certainly remarkable and to be admired. A 2017 UX tools survey showed just 7% of respondents were using Figma for UX/UI design. Fast forward to 2023 and they reached a staggering 90%. Today Figma is the unquestioned king when it comes to UX collaborative design. However does this actually have negative consequences for designers and kill innovation and creativity?

Monopolies are old as capitalism itself. A giant rises to dominate the landscape choosing to smother out competitors and begin to stagnate rather than continue to improve. These tales often end the same way, someone comes for the king’s crown. IBM, once the dominant player in computing, the “safe choice” was left in the dust by a changing landscape and superior innovation from Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft themselves would later fall victim to this as Microsoft Explorer once 95% of the internet browsing market  was decimated by the new kid on the block Google. Will Figma be the next victim of this tech monopoly cycle?

The Numbers Don’t Lie

When Figma emerged in 2016 they shook up the landscape and their rise left a number of casualties in their wake. Sketch was the dominant player but was limited to  Mac-OS. InVision required constant file uploads. Even the titan Adobe with its offering Adobe XD left designers frustrated with its limitations. Then came Figma with its radical proposition: design in the browser, collaborate in real-time, and never worry about version control again. Adobe admitted defeat when they attempted to buy Figma for $20 billion dollars only to be thwarted by the European commission over fears of anti-trust.

Figma changed the game and eventually led to the discontinuation of dev support for Adobe XD and implosion of InVision. Sketch, once holding an almost 45% market share has been relegated to a paltry 4.5%.The financials tell a similar story of market conquest. Figma’s revenue exploded from just $4M in 2018 to $400M in 2024—a 100x growth that reflects not success, but industry dependency. Figma now boasts over 60 million users across 200,000 organisations and a $10 billion valuation. 

The Pricing Revolt

As stated before monopolies usually breed complacency. Figma’s latest decisions are indicating they could be going down that path. Their U13 redesign has been met with criticism from many in the industry, previously each new Figma announcement was generally met with praise. Not this time as this update has been met with significant pushback from designers. Primarily centered around reduced usability and unnecessary changes to familiar workflows.

Most damning is that figma is seeming to move away from its mission statement “Make Design Accessible to Everyone”. Nowhere is this more evident than its approach to price increases.The most controversial change came with Dev Mode pricing. While Figma focused on developers by releasing their Dev Mode as a free beta in 2023, they turned this mode into a paid feature starting in 2024. Dev Mode access now costs $25 per seat per month on Organisation plans and $35 per seat per month on Enterprise plans. As teams usually consist of more developers than designers, this quickly rakes up the price for Figma seats and impacts the adoption of the tool among developers.

The developer backlash has been swift and brutal. “We use Figma in a large company where one ux designer serves around 10 developers. As a developer seat costs half a design seat we would quintuple our costs. This is Ridiculous,” one frustrated user wrote on Figma’s forums. The math is stark: teams with typical designer-to-developer ratios face cost increases of 300-500%.

For Freelancers, once Figma’s bread and butter, it is becoming a very costly option. Freelancers need to book additional seats for each client they work with. A freelance designer working with three clients simultaneously might need to pay for multiple organisation seats pricing them out of the platform that was once built with them in mind.

Enterprise teams aren’t spared either. The cost of the Professional plan went up by 33% from $15/month or $144/year to $20/​month or $192/​year, effective March 2025. For organisations with dozens of designers and hundreds of developers who need access to design files, the costs can explode into tens of thousands of dollars annually. 

The Adobe Formula

Design powerhouse and Figma contemporary Adobe could also be labelled as a creative space monopoly. Dominating a number of categories in the design space. Their pursuit to absorb Figma is proof of that. Figma seems to be following their blueprint with its latest product line launch.

Outside of the obvious negative consequences for the consumers pocket  the main issue with a monopoly is innovation stagnation. When a company dominates a market, where’s the competitive pressure to innovate? Figma’s recent product launches—FigJam, Dev Mode, Figma Draw, and now AI features seem to be an attempt to follow Adobe’s lead and try to dominate other creative spaces. This for sure comes at cost in terms of developing better and higher quality features in their core service. 

What’s Next?

For the UI/UX design industry’s health, competition matters. It drives innovation, keeps prices reasonable, and ensures that tools serve designers rather than the other way around. Whether a new company can rise and put pressure on Figma to change its ways is something not yet clear. Penpot is beginning to gain some buzz and popularity amongst designers.  

What’s certain is that the UI/UX design community is watching. After years of enthusiastic adoption, designers working on digital products are asking harder questions about tool dependency, pricing fairness, and creative autonomy.