There is a new sound in the studio this term. It is not a sound, exactly. It’s a student pausing before pressing Enter. Figma’s AI features now run on credits. A Full seat on a Professional plan gets 3,000 a month. A simple change costs around 30. A multi-screen flow can cost 300 or more. Undo doesn’t give them back. On Figma’s own forum, people describe running out after a handful of prompts. One says a whole month’s allowance was gone after a few screens. So now, before generating anything, my students do something I have spent eleven years trying to teach them. They stop and think about what they actually want.
The meter is not a limit on creativity. It is a price tag on not knowing what you want.
When generating was free, the prompt was a slot machine. Pull, look, pull again. Forty screens, none of them chosen, all of them almost fine. Exploration that costs nothing tends to be worth roughly that. Now every try has a cost, and something interesting happens. Students write the prompt on paper first. They sketch what they’re hoping for. They ask a classmate whether it even makes sense. It’s not quite design thinking. Not quite budgeting. It’s the moment before the work, finally given its proper weight. I don’t want to romanticise this. A meter also means some people can explore more than others. A student on a free plan and a team on Enterprise are not playing the same game, and “think harder” is easy advice when you’re not the one paying. That part bothers me, and it should bother anyone who teaches. But the meter is also a useful reminder of something paper never charged for. A sketch costs nothing. You can make fifty of them, throw away forty-nine, and lose only some graphite.
Explore where it’s free. Spend where you’ve decided. That’s the order I keep coming back to. Think in the cheap room, decide there, and take only the decision into the expensive one.
Margin note: Before your next AI prompt, sketch the result you’re hoping for in under a minute. If you can’t, you’re not ready to spend the credits.
How tools fit into the process, and in what order, is part of the Digital Product Design workshop for teams. See the workshops →
