I'm sorry what is the person complaining about?
Should every app on AWS using more than the free tier complain that AWS wants them to pay because they have a historically popular app?
Should every app on AWS using more than the free tier complain that AWS wants them to pay because they have a historically popular app?
Vimeo is obviously completely within their rights, but their pricing strategy is questionable from a small content creator's perspective.
The tagline on their front page even says "Simple tools for any professional, team, and organization to create, manage, and share high-quality videos." The definition of "professional" is certainly up for debate, but the other items in that list make me think they are not talking about small content creators.
I don't find it an absurd price point in that context. Many tools go from being free or very cheap to being very expensive in a single tier. GitLab comes to mind as one. Oracle is well known for what I like to call the "crack selling strategy"; the first hit's free, but every one after that is going to be really expensive.
They're just not going to be able to compete on price with YouTube, and I can see how it makes sense to support a small number of high-paying customers than it is thousands of tiny content creators. I don't know what they're offering that convinces people to pay for it, but there's apparently something there.
Would you pay someone if they came to you and said "Pay me $8k, you're using 53x more traffic than you think. No, you can't verify that." Or would you tell them to go kick rocks?