>Its surprising to me that the market is still stuck on SaaSpocalypse not noticing that these companies have pivoted hard in an impressive and revenue generating way

The cost of Figmas tokens was a frequent source of consternation at my prior engagement, and this was with a company that gave anybody $750/mo in Cursor credits if they asked nicely and filled out a form. Figma is also facing competition from Claude Design as well as other design tools that have a much cheaper price per seat, and allow you to BYOM. I wouldn't be surprised to see enterprises support a design tool switch if a lead showed how much money the company would save by switching away from Figma to something else.

From being on the other side of the table and seeing many of their clients, I’m seeing clients still pay the upfront engagement.

Claude Design isn’t going to change a corporation’s workflow, an individual contributor isn’t going to cause a workflow change in their own department and especially not another department. Management operates their department in a silo. The outside consultancy driving the executive’s desired AI transformation will. Figma/Adobe/Canva are operating there, and not just coming in with their own software. They just steer things in the direction of also burning tokens.

They’re doing workflow automations not really so vendor locked.