You get it wrong, she consumed $2106 worth of service and has paid $200 so far, that is a fantastic deal for her. Vimeo then says that next year since she consumed so much she will have to pay $3100. Vimeo here takes the risk that she gets more popular and therefore will cost them even more, they have to take a premium cut to cover for that risk.

A regular hosting provider would just send her the $2106 bill, but she went to Vimeo to avoid surprise bills. But instead she has to deal with price hikes like this, note that it isn't a bill, she can just not pay for it and cancel the service, that is the product she paid for.

> You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?

Well, Cloudflare Stream is underlying tech, you would need to write some code on top of it anyway. 40% of premium does not sound like something unreasonable either.

I agree that treating existing customer like that is not a good thing. I just tried to understand whether that price is reasonable at all.

If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.

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.

> If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.

If they're not willing to pay a hefty premium for it? I don't follow your comment, buddy. They're already a paying customer paying what was asked of them.

Why would you not just use Cloudfare Stream or another option and save roughly 40% of the cost?

If Vimeo has no value-add, then that's what people should be doing. It's not like Vimeo is a platform for content discovery like YouTube so it should be no problem for anyone to switch.

It's what everybody will start doing. This will be bane of Vimeo. You must realize most of the cinematographers or people in creative industry don't even know about alternatives. Vimeo had great MOAT exactly because they were "youtube for creatives".

Also services like cloudflare stream/bunnycdn stream/mux are fairly recent.

Another issue is reuploading of all the media. It's not that easy to switch. But people will flee to some other solutions.

Right. Vimeo has a pleasant player. I like it.

However, it's essentially the same service otherwise. Point your customers or business partners to a URL and they stream it from there.

It's basically a fact that she's underpaying for what she's using. That she gets no value out of the service isn't the fault of the service, she's just literally not using the service. Since that's the case she shouldn't use the service and use a different service that actually does what she wants and has the correct value proposition for her. It sounds like that's exactly what's happening and there's no problem anywhere. There's lots of comments here pitying vimeo for losing "customers" like her but err, vimeo's the one kicking her out. She gets on a service that's more appropriate for her, vimeo gets rid of a money losing customer. Everyone wins.