Why I Left Vimeo After 16 Years
"Urgent: Your Plus subscription has ended," read the email I received last week. It has indeed ended, and no, I don’t think I’ll be renewing this time.
Vimeo was originally a more artistic alternative to YouTube, geared toward filmmakers and home to an awesome community to boot. I don’t know who it’s for these days.
I’ve been a Vimeo user for 16 years, becoming a month-to-month Vimeo Plus subscriber in March 2010, a few months after graduating from my school’s Cinema & TV department and while finding my first paid freelance video editing gigs before landing my first internship and eventually my first staff job.
Naturally, I needed a portfolio site with my video work embedded, and a video hosting service to house it. Vimeo was a professional alternative to hosting on YouTube, with its affordable Plus tier at $9.95 allowing me to customize my video player with no Vimeo logos, higher-quality uploads, and all that good jazz.
What I really loved was the creativity it inspired and its awesome community. My first team would always share cool videos or short films, anything that sparked inspiration. As for the community, similar to Bear Blog challenges, there were challenges for filmmakers of all levels of proficiency. As an editor, I loved the editing challenges and how many people could make wildly different videos using the same shared footage. After four years, I committed to the $59.95 yearly plan in 2014.
Over the years, I added more projects from jobs, freelance gigs, and film festival shorts, and I was happy to keep using Vimeo. But eventually, something started to happen. The community aspect faded away. The easy-to-navigate website changed into a bloated, impossible-to-navigate, slow site. Even my maxed-out iMac would slow down when using Vimeo. I dreaded any time I had to manage my own work or my employer’s team account on there. And the one thing it should have been good at, video streaming, also sucked now. It was slow to load and to my horror, there were a few times where my embedded videos just stopped working because they changed something on the backend. Like, c'monnnn guys!
However, I stayed because I had too much work on there. I didn’t want to take the time to find a new video host, nor do the monumental task of reuploading my entire portfolio to that new host and re-embedding each video on my website.
Fast forward to 2025: my yearly bill jumped to $108.00. From $59.95? That’s essentially an 80% price increase. Now look, I get that 2025 prices shouldn’t be 2014 prices, but that was a startling jump. And honestly, I wouldn’t have minded paying it if Vimeo’s service, site, and community were all stellar. But why should I keep paying for a tool I dreaded using?
When I joined Vimeo in 2010, it was a YouTube alternative plus a community for filmmakers, visual artists, people who liked to tinker, and folks just doing fun shit.
If I Google, "Who is Vimeo for in 2026?", Google’s AI overview says: "In 2026, Vimeo is tailored for professional creators, businesses, and enterprises prioritizing high-quality hosting, robust privacy, and branded content presentation over social reach. Following its acquisition by Bending Spoons, it is shifting toward advanced AI-powered editing tools and monetization, serving as a corporate, marketing, and monetization platform rather than a social network."
All right!
[slaps knees, stands up, and does a Midwestern Goodbye]
With a few weeks of free time in February, I knew I had time at last to make my Vimeo exit. I decided to switch to Bunny.net, where many video folks are taking their Vimeo exodus. It’s pay-as-you-go, charging by storage and bandwidth. Since I simply use it as a portfolio and nobody is constantly watching my videos, my bill usually ranges from nothing to a few bucks.
I uploaded all of my videos to Bunny, recreated old thumbnails, made it an even bigger project by leaving Cargo Collective for Bear Blog, gleefully turned off Vimeo’s automatic renewal, and am happy with how things turned out. Bunny.net’s video player is fast, does the job, and its website dashboard has a simple, logical user interface.
Also, who doesn’t love bunnies?