Why teams are switching and what to look for
Users report price hikes exceeding 900% with no warning. Vimeo holds videos hostage when bandwidth caps are exceeded, demanding upgrades to restore access. Trustpilot and Sitejabber are filled with accounts of unauthorized charges and auto-renewals.
Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for $1.38B in November 2025 and laid off the majority of staff in January 2026, including the entire video team. This follows the same playbook applied to WeTransfer and Filmic Pro: acquire, slash headcount, raise prices, coast.
Trustpilot rating sits at 1.4/5. Only 2% of callers report issues resolved. Average hold time exceeds 30 minutes. Users describe being ghosted for weeks at a time.
All self-serve plans share a 2 TB/month bandwidth cap. Exceeding this twice in 12 months, or hitting 10 TB once, triggers a forced Enterprise upgrade conversation.
Modern video hosting with predictable pricing, AI-powered search across transcripts, and custom domains on every plan. Built for teams that need clean, branded video delivery without surprises.
Pricing: Starter $20/mo, Business $100/mo, Custom from $5,000/yr
Marketing-focused video platform with strong analytics, lead capture forms, and HubSpot/Marketo integrations.
Pricing: Pro $79/mo, Advanced $319/mo, Premium custom
Privacy-focused hosting with domain whitelisting, SSO, and dynamic watermarking. Strong security feature set at a lower price point.
Pricing: Seed $10/mo, Sprout $35/mo, Tree $75/mo, Forest $295/mo
Ultra-affordable pay-as-you-go infrastructure with a global CDN of 119+ PoPs. Developer-oriented with full API access.
Pricing: Pay-as-you-go, $1/mo minimum
API-first video infrastructure used by Patreon, Substack, and Shopify. Built for engineering teams embedding video into products.
Pricing: Free tier, then usage-based from $0.0024/min storage
Serverless video streaming built into the Cloudflare platform. Simple per-minute pricing for storage and delivery.
Pricing: Starter $5/mo, Creator $50/mo, Enterprise custom
| Platform | Pricing | Features | Ease of Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| host.video | From $20/mo flat | AI search, transcription, HLS, custom domains, password protection | Dashboard + API; no engineering required |
| Wistia | From $79/mo, per-video | Marketing analytics, CTAs, lead capture, webinars | Dashboard; some features have a learning curve |
| SproutVideo | From $10/mo + overages | Privacy controls, SSO, watermarking, video websites | Dashboard; straightforward setup |
| Bunny Stream | Pay-as-you-go, ~$0.01/GB | CDN delivery, HLS, DRM add-on, API | Developer-oriented; API or basic dashboard |
| Mux | Usage-based from $0.0024/min | Video API, analytics, multi-CDN, AI tools | API-only; requires engineering |
| Cloudflare Stream | From $5/mo, per-minute | Transcoding, CDN, signed URLs | Developer-focused; minimal UI |
If you are leaving Vimeo because of surprise billing, support failures, or uncertainty about the platform's future under Bending Spoons, the most important thing in a replacement is predictability. host.video offers flat monthly pricing with no bandwidth traps, AI-powered search and transcription included on every plan, and custom domains as a standard feature. It is built for teams that want to upload, embed, and move on without worrying about the next invoice.