Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

Vimeo felt like a good solution for someone who might be selling video courses. This is a use case where you might have 400-500x 5-10 minute videos spread over a few courses that were streamed to folks who purchased one of your courses using Vimeo's embedded video player that's sitting in a custom site you've built.

I think their old plan was like $200 / year (I didn't use them personally since I didn't have a custom platform running) and it felt reasonably priced for that use case. When I eventually release my custom platform I was planning to use them and be happy about it. Thankfully I haven't gotten to the video playing component of the platform yet because I wouldn't want to use them under this new pricing strategy.

Wistia's pricing plans aren't much better (they are a competitor to Vimeo). It's $1,200 / year but also 25 cents per video on top of that. If you have a lot of small videos you get crushed. Suddenly 400x 5 minute videos means another $100 / month ($2,400 / year total). I don't understand why they would make their pricing model based on something that punishes folks who make smaller videos. Breaking up a single 50 minute video into 10x 5 minute videos shouldn't cost you 10x the price IMO.

It's unfortunate because it might take you years of producing videos before you even make a few hundred bucks a month, $150-300 a month on day 1 is a ton relative to that especially since that's only 1 component of your costs, then there's web hosting, payment provider transaction fees, refund fees, various taxes, etc.. Kind of makes it hard to get into a position to succeed unless you're able to invest many thousands of dollars up front.

I wonder why do I watch only indie content on Vimeo?

She was already a paying customer, willing to pay them the price they had set before (which might have been too low, but that's their fault then, not hers). So up until this point she was a paying and "legit" customer. And they didn't know if she would be willing to pay significantly more if they asked for that.

>"I was already paying $200 a year [...]. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.

A week's notice for a 17.5x price hike you unilaterally declared? That's not what you should do to such a customer, ever. To me, that's either a shakedown, or a deliberate step to make her stop using the service, e.g. because such "small" account are no longer worth your time, or you try to be a b2b business now, and those "small" customers do not fit with that image, or whatever.

If something changed for vimeo that increased the their own expenditures over night, then I'd have a little more understanding for them. But that's not what they said or even hinted at happening.

The problem is that the acount in question would be a “low” to “midling” usage account in youtube or twitch terms. The kind where your friends tell you “just keep at it and one day you might find success”.

Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms.

The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo.

Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.

That one didn't have vimeo's response IIRC so this is still useful.