Vimeo changed its plans twice in October. The first change was a Free plan with unlimited public videos. The second, announced on October 28, retires every old individual plan and moves each account to a new one at renewal. Both changes rest on one new rule, called managed storage, and that rule decides whether your videos keep playing.
This is a plain reading of what Vimeo published, what it means for the three ways most people use a video host, and what we do differently at Stillhaven. Figures are from vimeo.com and help.vimeo.com, read on November 3, 2026. Check your own account before you act on any of it.
What Vimeo announced
On October 28 Vimeo introduced four individual plans and said the old ones are being sunset. Every account moves to a new plan at its next renewal, with a notice email one month before.
| Free | Creator | Core | Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price, billed annually | $0/mo | $9/mo | $24.50/mo | $71/mo |
| Public storage | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Managed storage | 3 GB | 50 GB | 500 GB | 7 TB |
Source: Vimeo, "An update on Vimeo plans", published October 28, 2026, updated November 2, 2026.
Two footnotes matter. Existing users who land on Core keep 2 TB of managed storage instead of 500 GB, for as long as that subscription continues. And Vimeo says companies are not allowed on the individual plans at all; they move to a separate Studio plan.
What managed storage is
Vimeo's help center splits your library into two buckets.
Public storage is for videos set to Public with embedding turned off. It is unlimited on every plan, including Free, and so is the bandwidth to play them.
Managed storage is everything else: any video with a privacy setting other than Public, and any video that has embedding turned on, even if nobody has embedded it anywhere. Managed storage is the number in the table above. Managed bandwidth is capped too (1 TB a month on Free).
So "unlimited" covers one kind of video: public, discoverable on Vimeo, watchable only on Vimeo. The moment a video is private, unlisted, password-protected, or embeddable on your own site, it counts.
What "locked" means
If your embeddable and non-public videos add up to more than your plan's managed storage, Vimeo locks some of them. A locked video is not deleted, but it does not play, including through links and embeds that are already out in the world.
Vimeo's help center gives three ways out: upgrade to a plan with enough managed storage, set the locked video to Public with embedding off, or delete it. A piece on CineD this week, from a member since 2008 whose legacy free account is now capped at 5 GB, adds a fourth detail worth knowing: on his locked videos the privacy and embed settings could not be changed, and download was not available either. His options were pay, publish, or delete. If you have an old account, log in and look before your renewal date, because the rules for legacy accounts are not the same as the rules for new ones.
What this means for the three common uses
For a public portfolio, the new Free plan is a real improvement. Finished shorts, showreels, music videos, anything you are happy to have on your Vimeo profile and in search, now costs nothing to host. That is the use Vimeo built the plan for, and it is a good deal.
For client work, every video is managed storage. A cut behind a password, an unlisted link to a producer, a review page for a wedding film: all of it counts against 3 GB on Free or 50 GB on Creator. One 4K project can fill the Free allowance on its own.
For course video and your own website, same thing. If the player lives on your site, embedding is on, and the video is managed storage whether or not it is also public. A course library on Creator has 50 GB to work with.
That is not a trick. It is a pricing decision that puts the cost where the value is for commercial users, and Vimeo says as much. But it means the headline number is not the number most working people should be looking at.
Hosting costs money. The question is what happens at the exit.
We closed our own Free plan on October 7, for reasons we wrote up at the time. Storage and delivery are real costs, and a host has every right to charge for them. Vimeo does.
Where we drew a different line is what happens when a plan ends or a limit is hit.
On Stillhaven, a plan that ends is paused, not locked. The owner can still sign in and download every video, including the original file, and choosing any plan restores everything. Nothing is deleted for going over. Past the bandwidth allowance, videos keep playing and the overage bills per GB. Past the monthly new-video allowance, the video is kept and processes next month, or the limit is lifted on request.
There is no public bucket and no managed bucket. Nothing is listed for the public to browse, every video is embeddable on every plan, and storage is one number.
For the plan most people compare against Vimeo Creator: Solo is $9 a month, or $7.50 a month billed annually, with 100 GB of storage, 300 GB of bandwidth a month, and 4 hours of new video a month. All of it can be private, password-protected, expiring, or embedded on your own site, and the original file is yours to download at any time. The Stillhaven badge stays on Solo share pages; embeds are clean once the account has paid.
Vimeo Creator gives you more features than Solo does, and Core or Professional give you far more storage if you need it. If your library is public and you want an audience on Vimeo, stay there. If your library is client work or course lessons, do the arithmetic with the managed storage number, not the unlimited one.
What to check before your renewal
- Open your Vimeo library and find the storage figure. If your account shows managed storage, note how much of it is used. If it shows a single total, you are on a legacy plan and the new rules do not apply yet.
- Count what is private, unlisted, password-protected, or embeddable. That is your managed storage. Compare it with the plan you will land on.
- Download originals for anything you do not have another copy of. Vimeo deletes source files 60 days after a paid plan lapses to Free. Do this before you change plans, not after.
- List every page where a Vimeo embed lives. If a video locks, that page breaks.
- If you sell through Vimeo On Demand, note that it shuts down on November 20, 2026. New sales already stopped on September 21, and buyer access ends on the 20th.
Our full checklist for moving a library off Vimeo, including what to export first and what breaks when a paid plan ends, is at stillhaven.io/leaving/vimeo.
Sources
- Vimeo, An update on Vimeo plans, published October 28, 2026, updated November 2, 2026.
- Vimeo Help Center, About managed storage on Vimeo, read November 3, 2026.
- Vimeo Help Center, About the Vimeo Free plan, read November 3, 2026.
- Vimeo Help Center, FAQ: Lapsing from a paid account to a Free account, read November 3, 2026.
- Vimeo, Vimeo On Demand shutdown notice, read November 3, 2026.
- CineD, Held hostage by Vimeo: 18 years of uploads, locked behind a paywall, November 2, 2026.
- Stillhaven, plans and pricing, read November 3, 2026.