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by KaoruAoiShiho 1550 days ago
If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.
2 comments

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.