Stitch Goes Infinite — And Figma Starts the Meter
Google's Stitch platform redesign and Figma's AI credit enforcement landed on the same day. Two tools, one week, two very different responses to the same pressure.
Google turned up the heat on the design industry this week, and the timing made everything sharper.
The Stitch update that landed on March 19 wasn't a features blog post — it was a platform redesign. An infinite canvas (proper, Figma↗-style), a design agent that tracks project history across sessions, voice input, a portable DESIGN.md format for design tokens, and an MCP server that connects designs directly to Claude Code↗, Cursor↗, or Gemini CLI without a handoff step. Figma↗'s stock dropped roughly 8%.
Stitch still can't replace Figma↗ for production work. No real-time collaboration, no plugin ecosystem, no animation tooling. But the ideation phase — ten directions before lunch, exploring concepts before you know which one to commit to — is under genuine pressure from a tool that costs nothing. 350 generations a month, Figma↗-format export, Gemini 2.5 Pro under the hood. Free is a difficult price point to argue with.
What made this week unusual: the same day Stitch dropped, Figma↗ began enforcing its AI credit limits. Free users get 500 credits a month (with a 150/day cap); Enterprise seats scale to 4,200. There are top-up options from $120/month and pay-as-you-go billing coming in May. The direction is clear — Figma↗ is moving from pure seat licensing toward something closer to consumption pricing.
Two tools, one week, two different responses to the same pressure. Google's bet is that you try Stitch for free and discover how much you want it. Figma↗'s bet is that the production-grade work already living on its platform — shared systems, design review workflows, component libraries — is worth a usage bill. Both bets are probably correct, for different users at different stages.
The smaller story: Raycast opened its Glaze↗ beta, a tool for building native Mac desktop apps by chatting with AI. Not a design tool exactly, but the clearest sign yet that vibe coding has escaped the browser. Apps that live in your menu bar, touch your file system, and work offline — instead of another web app deployed to Vercel.