Figma just launched an ‘app store’ for designers

Community launched in 2019 as a portfolio of sorts, where Figma creators could share plug-ins, widgets, and various applications they have created, and others could use and riff on them, mostly for free. But anyone familiar with the platform may have noticed that Community had gotten a little bit out of hand recently. Creators were posting paid plug-ins and widgets they had spent a long time developing, but Figma couldn’t accommodate for native payment, so they had to link to a third-party website. Meanwhile, users couldn’t tell which widget were paid and which were free, leading to frustration. “They felt bait-and-switched,” says Rogie King, a design advocate at Figma.

Launching today, Community 2.0 seeks to fix those frustrations by providing clear labels right on the homepage, indicating whether a plug-in, widget, or file is paid or free. It also provides creators with a native payment functionality that lets them track earnings, transactions and views on a new personal dashboard. “Our goal is that we want to create value for creators, we really want them to feel like it’s worth it for them to double down and make better products,” says King.

A year in the making, the upgrade was informed by one-on-one conversations with regular users, but also support tickets and tweets. The updated platform reads a bit like a native app store, although you don’t have to download anything given that Figma was built on the very promise that constant downloads are inefficient, and collaboration should happen on the cloud.

For every paid transaction that occurs on the site, Figma will collect a 15% fee to cover transactional costs, a support team, and fraud and abuse monitoring. Creators who want to opt out of this can continue to sell externally, in which case the app will be labeled a little differently on the Community homepage.

Might the new platform, which makes it easier for creators to sell and buyers to buy, encourage more paid widgets than the free, open-source spirit that Figma was built on? Figma hasn’t set a cap to how many applications on the platform should be free versus paid, but the team insists the creators’ motivation remains to make free stuff. “The one thing I found very surprising about the Figma Community when I joined is how altruistic and how strong the open-source DNA of the community is,” says Alina Luk, a product manager at Figma. She says the risk of it skewing toward paid apps is plausible, but she doesn’t envision motivations to change overnight. “I do still do see people continuing to make tic tac toe, and rock-paper-scissor widgets for free because people derive a lot of value from giving back in that way.”

To further incentivize creators to make free resources, Figma is also launching a Creator Fund, which is a grants program that anyone can apply to. Amounts will vary based on the scale of the application. As Luk says, “The Creator Fund is really our way of supporting those people to continue doing what they love.”