Is Figma free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —Unlimited drafts; shared team files and projects are paid features
• —150 AI credits a day, 500 a month
• —Figma's pricing page does not state a file or collaborator cap for Starter

Where the wall is

Working as a team. Drafts are personal; the moment two designers need one shared project with proper permissions, every editor needs a full seat. Figma prices by seat type — Full, Dev, Collab — so the bill depends on who edits, not how many look.

After that: Professional: Full seat $16 a month, Dev $12, Collab $3. Organization (annual): Full $55, Dev $25, Collab $5. Enterprise (annual): Full $90, Dev $35, Collab $5. Viewers are free on every plan.

Can you self-host Figma? No — cloud only

Figma is hosted only. Penpot is the self-hosted design tool compared here and reads Figma files; Excalidraw and Inkscape cover the whiteboard and vector halves.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

When paying is still the right call

Stay if you have real-time multiplayer in daily use — Figma's is still the best in the category and the alternatives are visibly behind. Stay if your workflow depends on the plugin ecosystem, which is enormous and not replicated anywhere. Stay if developer handoff matters more than licence cost, because Dev Mode is genuinely good. And stay if your team is small enough that a few seats is not the problem it becomes at twenty.

What you are locked into

High, and it is the file format. `.fig` is proprietary and nothing else opens it natively; Penpot can import Figma files but the fidelity is imperfect on complex documents. Components, variants and design tokens are structured Figma's way, so a migration means rebuilding a design system rather than exporting one. Teams that keep tokens in a neutral format such as Style Dictionary keep the exit far cheaper.

If you would rather not pay: Penpot