I Burned 500 Figma AI Credits Before Realising I Hadn't Thought Enough

I recently used Figma AI to create high-fidelity designs for my travel webapp. The first result was impressive - responsive layouts for desktop and mobile, polished enough to make the product feel real.

Then I noticed I'd already used 500 of my 3,000 AI credits. And the design still needed significant changes.

The First Draft Wasn't the Problem

The problem was that I hadn't thought through the product deeply enough before asking AI to design it.

There were still decisions around different screen states, responsive behaviour, interactions and how individual pages should connect. Every change meant another round of AI generation.

AI made iteration easier, but iterations are not free too.

AI Changes the Economics of Prototyping

Before AI, spending time on a design iteration naturally forced me to think carefully about what I wanted.

With generative tools, it's tempting to just generate something and fix it later.

But when AI usage is metered by credits, tokens, time or money, careless iteration becomes expensive, especially when the first output isn't close enough to the final direction.

My New Rule: Think Before You Generate

Instead of asking AI to build the entire product immediately, I'd now:

1. Think through the key screens and states. 2. Define the product behaviour clearly. 3. Start with one representative page. 4. Refine the design direction. 5. Only then scale it across the product.

This reduces rework and gives AI a much clearer target.

AI Is Still the Shortcut

Despite the wasted credits, Figma AI showed me something valuable.

I'm not a professional UI designer, and manually defining responsive design rules and polishing every screen would take considerably more effort. Figma could intuitively handle much of that design work and give me a much stronger starting point.

The lesson wasn't “use less AI.” It was “use AI more deliberately.”

Think carefully, plan more, convey your instructions concisely but clearly. This can be applied to all AI platforms. This is token conservation mindset.

Conclusion: Generative AI makes building dramatically faster, but good thinking upfront is still the cheapest form of iteration.