What happens to Figma accounts when the owner dies

Not by Figma. Every transfer mechanism Figma publishes -- file, folder, team, and cross-account folder or team transfer -- requires the current owner or an admin to act from a signed-in session, and the Terms of Service provide in section 9.7 that access to the Services is "not assignable or transferable by Customer without Figma's prior written consent." Figma's own published answer to a departed team owner does not include Figma performing the transfer; it points instead at recovering the original account through the email address it uses, or at letting the subscription lapse and rebuilding.

Figma publishes a direct answer to this under "Our team owner has left the company." Its first option is account recovery driven from the email address on the account, which Figma frames as something a company IT team does. That route means signing in as the person who died, so an executor should take advice on it rather than assume it is open to them. Its second is to stop paying and rebuild: an admin cancels the subscription and lets it expire, then creates a new team and moves the original team's folders into it. Figma states that where no admins remain at all, its support team can remove the card on file to prevent renewals if given the last four digits and expiration date of the card and the date and amount of the most recent payment.

It keeps billing. Figma states subscriptions are not canceled automatically when an account is deleted, and that a paid Professional subscription must be canceled before the account can be deleted at all. On Professional, promoting another member to admin does not move the billing details, so the deceased's card stays on the subscription until someone changes or removes it. Download the invoices before anything is deleted -- Figma states they are not accessible afterwards.

Usually not, and this is the most reliable route available. Figma states that when a user is removed from a plan, the drafts they created are collected into a folder in Admin so admins can reach them, on the Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans. Organization and workspace admins can also claim an ownerless team, and a team owner or admin can claim an ownerless folder by joining it as owner. None of that requires contacting Figma. The one limit Figma names is that moving the recovered drafts folder into a team is not supported on the Professional plan.