Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars — or leave the platform

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

When it was still an independent creator platform, Lois van Baarle joined Vimeo as a student studying animation. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos, as Patreon itself didn't offer video hosting, and YouTube didn't have the same features to protect her work.

I was already paying $200 a year, so I thought it was a quality platform. Her most viewed video has over 800 views.

Van Baarle was shocked by the notice Vimeo sent her. She would need to upgrade to a custom plan if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site. The price was $3,500 a year. She was given a week to either upgrade her content or leave Vimeo.

She says that she has never had it where a platform reached out to her and told her to pay up or leave.

Van Baarle is not alone in her experience. Several Patreon creators have received the same message from Vimeo in recent months, causing a tailspin of confusion and panic over potentially losing their video work. Vimeo is shifting its focus toward large corporate clients, leaving long time Vimeo users scrambling for an alternative.

In January, Channel 5 received a similar message. Channel 5 creators say that after returning from a trip, they saw that their videos had disappeared from the Patreon feed, resulting in hundreds of angry messages.

Channel 5 posted pictures of their price for a new custom plan, which starts at $7,000 a year, and that an upgrade or migration off of Vimeo was required.

According to the company's website, Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player and thumbnail image, download and livestreaming. Unless an account is in the 99 percentile of users, overage charges aren't imposed. The threshold is between 2 to 3 terabytes per month, according to Vimeo. Vimeo isn't shy about its policy to charge top creators more.

On some high consumption accounts, Vimeo has been losing money, and they made the decision to implement.

When a user reaches the threshold, the company works with creators to accommodate their higher bandwidth needs, according to Matt Anchin, Vimeo's head of communications.

Our goal will always be to provide the best video solution possible and work with our users so they can continue to reach their audiences in high quality. Over 70% of users flagged for excessive bandwidth choose to upgrade to a custom plan or lower their usage.

Over the past four to five years, Vimeo has made a hard pivot away from being the YouTube alternative that van Baarle and other video creators originally signed up for. In the Vimeo Q4 earnings report, the CEO said that the goal is to be a software company for businesses of all sizes.

In a letter to shareholders in February, Sud spells out the shift out in black and white, "Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination." We are a B2B solution.

The change in strategy has hit Patreon users particularly hard, as they have been encouraged to use Vimeo as a hosting platform. There is a Vimeo integration that allows creators to directly uploaded gated content. The creators of Channel 5 didn't realize when they uploaded their videos to Patreon that they were actually hosted on Vimeo. She made a business decision over a decade ago to use Vimeo.

Vimeo has become irrelevant over time, and has no cultural impact on the level of YouTube. I still chose Vimeo.

Since 2008, Sunny Singh has uploaded more than 4,000 videos to Vimeo and was already paying about $900 a year for the service. He was warned that his bandwidth usage was getting high and that he may hear from the company about a custom plan when he log into his Vimeo account late last year.

Singh was warned by Vimeo that he too would need to upgrade his account or decrease his usage within nine days if he wanted to avoid an interruption. Singh's custom plan would cost $3,000 a year. Singh's Vimeo uploads only get around 700 views on average, and most of his viewers are on YouTube, where the same content is uploaded.

Singh, who has a background in data science, requested his data from Vimeo and ran his own analysis to understand how his projected bandwidth consumption was calculated. He used his numbers to negotiate his rate down from $3,000 to $2,500 after his analysis suggested that Vimeo's projection was higher than it should be. Singh had no choice but to pay the new fee because he had custom-coded his content distribution system years ago around the Vimeo platform, which would have required him to redesign the back end.

I paid for this year, but I don't intend on paying again next year.

The company has been in touch with Patreon throughout the partnership, and Vimeo says it offers users ways to track their bandwidth usage.

There is always room for improvement, and we are working to enhance our transparency and communication around bandwidth usage, both on and off our platform.

Some creators have left Vimeo in the face of higher hosting fees. Van Baarle plans to host her video content for free on the video sharing website, instead of paying for a custom plan. According to a brief update in early February, Channel 5 was able to recover their content with the help of Patreon. They say in the post that their Vimeo account was wiped from the face of the earth because of no paid upgrade. The next Channel 5 video would be hosted on the service's own video platform, though for now it is only available to select users.

Patreon is focused on meeting the ever-evolving needs of creators and patrons, and we have heard first-hand from both that relying on third-party video tools causes issues with upload limits or content leaks. The company hopes to have a native video tool for all users by the end of the year, according to Satterwhite. The company wouldn't say if it would recommend Vimeo as a hosting platform.

If creators are hit with a Vimeo notice of excessive bandwidth usage, they have a responsibility to be notified by Patreon. He is worried that if new creators gain traction quickly, they could jump into Vimeo's top user base and get the same email he and others did.

Singh doesn't think that Patreon is being respectful of the risk that they are putting creators in.

Comments from Vimeo have been added to the March 15th update.