Figma restricts MCP access to whitelisted clients, excluding Pi

thdr

https://nitter.meowing.monster/GayaniFigma/status/2105295629...

dyllon

Frankly, “whitelisting” clients is against the spirit of MCP.

pjm331

Another thing they do that I find equally frustrating is their MCP can do things you cannot do via API so you are forced to use theirs and cannot implement your own

alex7o

That is very old, I use a figma CLI patched to look like Claude code so I can use it for everything

linuxftw

We're talking about client request headers, right? Why even bother with such a thing? Malicious users will just spoof those, you're only going to annoy legitimate users.

miguel-muniz

For context: Figma has two MCPs. The local "dev" MCP that works through the Desktop app, and the remote MCP that requires a connection to Figma. Companies need to be whitelisted to use the remote MCP, which is the only one that allows agents edit access to Figma documents. I only found out about Figma's limitation when I was trying to add the remote MCP server to GitHub Copilot Desktop and kept running into errors. Turns out they whitelisted GitHub Copilot CLI but not the Desktop app and had put a pause on enabling any more vendors. Eventually someone (not sure which side) got it working. Kind of strange to limit edit access only to the Remote MCP when their competitors like Pen[1] and Paper[2] allow any local agent to edit. [1] https://www.pen.dev/ [2] https://paper.design/

srulyrosenblat

This was always a possibility, when my team dug into the concentration of MCP server usage a year ago we found that the top 10 servers had half of all GitHub stars (the Figma server was in 10th at the time). https://www.oreilly.com/radar/mcp-in-practice/ MCP is only as useful as the servers people use are open.

spwa4

I think we'll see more of this. Of course SAAS companies like Figma, and soon Adobe and ... will see that their tools are still useful. And they are useful to LLMs like they are useful to humans. The obvious play to "extract value" from that is to restrict access to bots and offer LLM integration themselves, for a fee.

sparkling

We need to fake User-Agent now for our MCP clients? Could have just sticked to plain old HTTP then ;)

rirze

Funny enough, I saw some tweet earlier today about their company trying to get past the legal hurdles with getting figma mcp to work and ended up bluntly giving up. Wonder if this is related.

cosmotic

Allow-listed would be a more accurate and more inclusive term.

happyPersonR

Penpot has an mcp… might be time to take a look.

mcbuilder

As someone making my own harness, this makes me sad. Pi is a big inspiration and one of the best open source harnesses, but there are many others. dsh, opencode, hermes, etc. MCP is such a thin layer to implement for any harness, this just seems arbitrary.

triyambakam

I've seen other apps do this as well e.g. Cal.com

JimDabell

OpenCode seems to have been given the run-around as well: > on the figma mcp, we've had an email thread going on for 8 months trying to get it setup in opencode > they seem very concerned with the labs competing with them > finally got unblocked after i sent this email and it'll be rolled out in a week or so The email: > looking through the legal stuff the amount of things in there seems pretty crazy > this is just an mcp server, there are thousands of them. we're not going to treat figma like its special > we've been talking about this for this entire year, i don't think this makes much sense and i don't want my team burning more time on this > once again, for a simple mcp server — https://www.threads.com/@thdxr/post/Dd7LN-ylLQW

hadi77ir

What happens if someone sends requests that look like to be OpenCode, but from Pi? What is stopping people from doing it? And how these measures are going to benefit Figma? I don't get it.

thehappypm

Why is this a global config — shouldn’t this be configurable per customer?

SkyPuncher

I do security review for my company. I suspect this is a means of containing OAuth redirect vulnerabilities. We basically needed to do the same thing with our MCP server. The security problem is two fold: (1) companies want control over where their data goes. Figma allowing any MCP creates problems (2) open redirects can create phishing issues. If your using Pi, you’re probably thinking of this. Most users aren’t. For us, we decided to do an allowlist pattern because it was a reasonable tradeoff. The solution is allowing per-tenant client configuration, but that comes with its own set of issues (dev time, support, maintenance, etc). When nearly all of the money is flowing through a handful of well-known MCPs there’s little reason to out effort into supporting every MCP.

WhitneyLand

Even if you’re whitelisted you get only 6 accesses a day on a standard account, have to pay for a dev account to get 200/day which still isn’t great. For my Figma needs, having Codex do computer use seems just as good as their mcp. I can tell it, “go download the assets for what I need and take a few screenshots for reference”.

randbyte

This is naive. With extreme prevalence of vibe coding it’s a matter of time before someone turns their local app into an mcp proxy.