Key Takeaways

  • Figma generated $391 million in quarterly revenue, growing 43% year over year while sustaining a net dollar retention rate of 131%.
  • The company's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server crossed one million weekly active users, orchestrating 5% of total credit consumption in the quarter.
  • Instead of protecting token margins through tight metering, Figma doubled credit allotments on Pro tiers and increased Enterprise allowances by 60%.
  • Management relies on Jevons paradox: making AI credits more abundant encourages team-wide habits that expand total consumption over time.

Giving Away Capacity Expands the Bill

Most software leaders protect margins by rationing usage. When inference bills rise, the instinct is to meter every action, set restrictive caps, and hit customers with overage fees. Figma took the opposite route.

CFO Praveer Melwani revealed how the company restructured credit allowances: “one of the things we did over the course of the quarter was repric our credits. We actually doubled the allotment that folks get on our pro plans and grew the allotments on organ enterprise plan 60%” (play from 54:06)

The strategy relies on Jevons paradox. In resource economics, making a commodity cheaper or more accessible increases total consumption rather than lowering demand. When designers worry about burning limited monthly tokens on experimental mockups, they stop using AI tools entirely. When you double their allowance, they weave the AI agent into daily work. Teams start using automated layout generation for routine tasks, and their aggregate activity expands past the baseline allowance.

Financial results validate that approach. Melwani shared the high-level figures: “We, you know, we put up 391 million in revenue. We grew the business 43% year-over-year.” (play from 47:06)

Retention metrics show that existing customers continue to expand their spending. Melwani pointed out that “our net dollar retention rate sat at, you know, 131%.” (play from 47:14) When software teams do not have to watch their credit meters with anxiety, they upgrade tiers and add seats.

Open Protocols Feed the Core Product

Software vendors frequently treat open agent architectures as an existential risk. If external coding agents and autonomous models can read and write files without human intervention, founders worry that the web interface loses its value. Figma turned that concern into a distribution channel by supporting Anthropic's Model Context Protocol.

Melwani reported rapid uptake for the integration: “So, you know, our MCP server is up, you know, to about just over a million weekly active users at this point.” (play from 47:47)

Those automated connections are not cannibalizing revenue. Instead, they drive the meter. As Melwani highlighted, “It's about 5% of all of credit consumption in the quarter was actually orchestrated via MCP.” (play from 49:35)

When you open your data layer through standardized protocols, third-party agents become active consumers of your backend. An engineer instructing an external coding model to extract component tokens from a canvas still consumes credits. The interface becomes optional for developers, but the central data store remains mandatory. Figma gets paid for the orchestration regardless of which client initiates the request.

What to Do With This

Audit your software pricing this week to see whether restrictive caps are choking adoption. If your paying accounts leave half their monthly credits untouched because they fear sudden overage charges, double their allowance. Track your expansion pipeline over the following two months: teams that build unrestricted daily habits will consume enough volume to justify moving to higher contractual tiers.