Tools should not be borders

On Monday, Figma sent out an email reminding all customers that the price of a basic seat is going up again, to $16 a month. As a small business owner, I can’t avoid these recurring costs, and I’m currently doing OK, so I don’t open emails about money that I know will just stress me out. If I’m in money trouble, I’m confident that my finance person or my accountant will let me know.

In fact, I will confess that I don’t even know what my tooling costs me each month. I pay for Figma, Notion, Google Suite, web hosting, Mobbin, Meetup, Zoom, and I subscribe to various publications that are work-related. I’m going to guess it adds up to about €200 a month, and I have this sinking feeling I’m actually paying for Figma twice. I can buy all the latest books as a business expense.

That’s “it’s one banana, what’s that, ten dollars?” privilege, I’m very aware of it. But I also didn’t always have it, and I also know how much of it is luck, and how easily someone’s luck can run out.

I’ve been trying for a long time to start a conversation about the inequities in our discipline. I wrote about this on LinkedIn, and I encourage you to read the comments there from folks who are affected by the price of tooling. But I wanted to make a slightly longer version that won’t get buried in a feed.

When tooling goes up, so do the walls

I have beloved peers and friends who are crowdfunding to stay alive, and using food banks. Others are making half a million a year to do the same work we all do (my perspective on this will be even less popular, but is a topic for another day). If you don’t think $16 is a lot of money, and you don’t know anyone for whom that kind of recurring cost puts something out of reach, I think you should sit out this part of the conversation.

In design and content disciplines, you need a pretty specific setup to get the experience you need to get a job, to take on projects, and even to be seen as legible by your disciplinary peers. These tools are largely not optional, and you need at least some of them in order to get a foot in the door. If, once you’re inside that door, you happen to stumble (or, given the increasing velocity of layoff cycles, you’re pushed) those recurring costs could be a barrier for your continued participation.

In the UK, for example, if you’re on unemployment benefit, you’re earning £90 a week. If all you’re paying for is Figma, some web hosting for your portfolio, and maybe Notion, that’s a not-insignificant amount of your monthly income, just to continue doing what’s needed to get a new job.

If you’re in Poland, Portugal, or Spain, earning €35,000 or equivalent is a pretty good income, but if you’re a small agency trying to fund software seats for a team, or a self-employed person, a few hundred euro a month per person becomes a much bigger expense.

A lot of companies rely on labor in countries where there are skilled professionals and low costs of living, but increasingly, those people are expected to be a source of cheap labor while also paying for more and more tooling, including growing requirements for paid versions of LLM tools.

Nobody should have to settle for being a source of cheap labor, but it becomes extra problematic when you’re reminded of your unequal status by a feed of comments saying that $16 is basically no money at all.

But it’s not just about the cost of specific tools, it’s what relying on a very particular setup does to our discipline at a global level.

Required software turns the digital divide into a crevasse

I work on a global product, directly related to Internet development, and as a researcher, I study infrastructure resilience, so these issues are close to my heart. We’re relying on tools that demand continuous access to reliable Internet, and that’s not a given for most of the world. I’m on a late-model MacBook on a super-fast wired broadband connection in a city, and Figma makes my machine run hot. Imagine how that works for someone juggling a host of other challenges.

Outside of Europe, where Internet costs can be a significant chunk of income for slower, less reliable access, and where the latest devices are out of reach for the average person, running software as heavy as Figma could be impossible.

Running user interviews can be patchy—I’ve had people drop out mid-meeting because of electricity outages. When the subsea cable faults happened in the Baltic Sea last November, we experienced absolutely no impact on performance. But when doing interviews with someone in East Africa after the cable faults in the Red Sea, it was clear that a place with a lot less redundancy doesn’t have the same experience I do.

The digital divide isn’t something that’s just on hemispheric lines. I lived in Ireland for 15 years, and the National Broadband Scheme that we were promised in the 1990s didn’t start making an impact until a couple of years ago. People have been relying on dongles for their connectivity, making remote work difficult, if not impossible, which is an even bigger problem in a country that has a massive housing crisis in its cities.

In the US, the Center on Rural Innovation has a broadband service map that shows sometimes huge pockets where connectivity is poor or nonexistent, including in cities.

Location-based pricing is only a tiny start

Our field and our tools are becoming walled gardens, right at the time when we have all the means and an urgent need to collaborate, build solidarity, and support each other, across borders and earning categories.

The norms and standards are defined by a small number of people earning the most money, under the best conditions, in a handful of tech hubs in global minority countries (i.e. the “global north”), and anyone outside of that category already has to fight a lot harder to be seen as legible, legitimate members of our discipline. I’ve felt this a lot, even just as someone who works in a different way, also in a relative tech hub. And I know that I am extraordinarily privileged when compared to, well, most of the rest of the world.

We say ourselves that design isn’t about tools, that it’s about solving problems, that it’s about meeting user needs, but what about our own communities? How many talented, awesome, or even just regular, normal people (because you shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be included) are missing from our communities because the barriers that are invisible for us are impenetrable walls for them?

This work is not rocket science. We have meetings, move stuff around screens, and ask people if they understand how to do a thing. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just to remind ourselves that there’s no reason to be so precious about what we do that we absolutely must cling to a very specific way of doing it.

It’s never been so urgent to build solidarity, collaborate and communicate, and we have so much at our disposal to do that. But the comment I keep seeing is that Figma and other companies can charge what they want, which is true. And it’s why I want to ask: how can we make sure we are less reliant on expertise with paid tools, and continuous access to resources, just for people to participate in the work?