After 15 years of using Vimeo Pro, I’ve decided it’s time to call it quits. It’s not an easy decision – Vimeo used to be the place for indie filmmakers, a community where you felt seen and supported.
It was great for embedding video links on websites, with a customizable player that let you match your brand colors and keep things looking clean. It was great as a freelance video editor, offering me a tool to share and review video drafts with clients. And it was a great platform for releasing our films via Vimeo On Demand, letting us fully DIY our distribution, earn extra income, and reach a global audience – something the more US-centric platforms like Amazon couldn’t offer if you didn’t pay to subtitle your film in multiple languages.
Vimeo still has some of these advantages, but the negatives have grown so overwhelming that they now outweigh the positives. Add in a recent price increase from $288AUD to $360AUD – a whopping 25% jump – and it’s the final straw for me. So, here are all the reasons why I’m done with Vimeo:
The UI is a Disaster
Every time I log into Vimeo it’s a 50/50 bet to see whether the UI has changed yet again. I swear, it feels like every month the dev team changes the design and I can never find anything. Settings I am used to using frequently disappear overnight.
Once it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to make a video “Private” and set a password. These settings used to be front and centre under the “Video Settings” menu, logical and easy to find, and a necessary step to finish uploading a video. Now they’re buried under the “Share” menu – because apparently, hiding privacy settings under a tab named after the exact opposite concept makes sense? It’s a clunky, unintuitive mess that takes far more time than it should to do basic tasks.
Vimeo Went Corporate
There used to be a common online debate in the early 2010s about what platform is better for filmmakers: Youtube or Vimeo. No longer. Vimeo took itself out of the race.
This shift happened a few years ago when Anjali Sud took over as CEO. She didn’t mince words about Vimeo’s new direction, stating, “We were sort of the more indie, higher end, more artistic version of YouTube.” But that wasn’t where the money was. Instead, Sud announced:
“I became CEO to pivot the company away from being a viewing destination or media platform, like Facebook or YouTube or Netflix, and really into a video SaaS or software company for businesses.”
Vimeo celebrating going corporate
It’s no surprise, really. Vimeo is a publicly traded company, and like every other public company, it’s trapped in the quest for endless growth – that mythical god investors worship. And this is where the process of "enshittification" begins: platforms start by creating something of high quality to attract users, then they degrade the service to cater to business customers, and finally, they squeeze every ounce of value out of both users and businesses to maximize shareholder profits.
Right now, Vimeo is squarely in phase two. It’s chasing businesses, but honestly, not doing a great job of it. Their share price has plummeted 90% since their IPO peak in 2021, making you wonder if phase three – maximizing shareholder profits – is even a possibility.
Either way, it’s clear the indie filmmakers who helped build their brand in the first place have well and truly been abandoned.
Bye-Bye Community and Hello EU Restrictions
One of the things that used to make Vimeo special was its sense of community. You could connect with other filmmakers, discover amazing new work, and feel like you were part of something bigger. But that’s all gone now, and for users in the EU and UK, it’s even worse.
Vimeo has made sweeping changes in these regions, citing compliance with the GDPR and other privacy regulations. The most noticeable loss? Site-wide search. That’s right – you can’t search for videos across the platform anymore. If you don’t have a direct link, good luck finding anything. Channels and groups are gone too, as are curated collections like the famous Staff Picks.
These changes have gutted what used to be a thriving community. Filmmakers now have fewer ways to connect, fewer opportunities for visibility, and even less reason to stick around. Vimeo says these changes were necessary for compliance, but it feels more like a shortcut. Instead of adapting features to meet regulations, they just scrapped them entirely. The result? A platform that feels hollow, disconnected, and far less useful than it once was.
Diminishing Vimeo On Demand Sales
Our titles on Vimeo On Demand
For years, Vimeo On Demand was our go-to platform for launching films. It gave us control – over the release date, pricing, and marketing strategy – things you just don’t get with platforms like Amazon or Apple TV. With Vimeo, we could set a release date that aligned with PR campaigns and promotions, ensuring our film reached its audience at the right time. And financially, it was a no-brainer. Vimeo let us keep 90% of our revenue from sales, a massive improvement over the pennies Amazon offers.
We used this strategy successfully with films like Daughter, In Corpore, and Machination, capturing strong day-one sales by directing our audience to Vimeo first. But those days are gone. Our last release, No Woman is an Island, struggled to gain traction. Maybe it was the niche appeal of the documentary, but Vimeo’s recent restrictions in the EU and UK, combined with the removal of discoverability features like search and channels, didn’t help. There’s no way to grow an audience organically on the platform anymore.
To make matters worse, Vimeo discontinued its TV apps in 2023 across platforms like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. That means viewers can no longer watch Vimeo On Demand films on their smart TVs – a major downgrade in user experience. What kind of platform expects you to tell your audience, “Enjoy my movie... on your laptop”? For filmmakers who care about giving their audience the best possible viewing experience, this is a dealbreaker.
And it’s not just about launching new films. Our back catalog, once a reliable source of trickling income, has dried up. We now average maybe one or two sales a month, not even close to covering the annual Pro subscription fee. Between the poor discoverability, regional restrictions, and declining viewer experience, Vimeo On Demand has lost its edge as a viable distribution platform for filmmakers like me.
Less Functionality, Higher Costs
And then there’s that price increase. As mentioned, Vimeo Pro recently jumped from $288AUD to $360AUD annually, and they’re trying to spin it as a benefit. Here’s the opening paragraph from their email:
“We wanted to let you know that on 05/04/25, the price of your plan will increase to $360.00 billed annually, (plus applicable taxes). And today, we're removing weekly upload limits, to give you unlimited access to 1TB of total storage.”
Let’s break that down. “Unlimited access to 1TB of total storage” is one hell of a sentence. “Unlimited” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Before, my Vimeo Pro account had a weekly upload limit of 20GB — which, to be fair, was sometimes annoying, especially with large feature film files — but at least there was no total storage limit. Now, I’m expected to pay more money for what feels like less freedom.
To put this in perspective: Google Drive gives me 2TB of storage for $124.99AUD a year. YouTube? It’s free, with no total storage limit at all. Vimeo’s offering feels less like an upgrade and more like a downgrade, dressed up in marketing jargon.
Still, this price hike is nothing compared to what some creatives faced in 2022. Vimeo implemented significant changes to its bandwidth usage policies, leading to substantial price increases for certain creators, especially those using Vimeo to host subscriber-only content for Patreon supporters.
One of these creators was Lois van Baarle, a digital artist from the Netherlands. Despite her videos averaging only 150 views each, Vimeo informed her that her bandwidth usage placed her in the top 1% of users. Her annual subscription of $200 was suddenly rebranded as “unsustainable,” and Vimeo told her she’d need to switch to a custom plan costing $3,500 a year – a staggering 1650% increase.
Lois summed it up perfectly:
“Vimeo has become extremely irrelevant over time and has no cultural impact on the level of YouTube. But I still chose Vimeo. And what do I get in return?”
So Why Stay?
Honestly, I can’t think of a good reason. Vimeo has shifted so far from its original purpose that it is a shell of its former self and no longer serves indie filmmakers like me. Between the poor UI, lack of community, dwindling sales, restrictions and exorbitant costs, it’s clear the platform just isn’t worth the hassle anymore.
It’s sad to leave something that was once such a big part of my filmmaking journey, but the Vimeo I loved is long gone. Here’s hoping something better comes along for indie creators like us. Until then, I’m out.
Written by Ivan Malekin
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