Well that’s telling. Sounds like a company that’s on the rocks trying to squeeze money out of a small number of users to survive.
Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing.
That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I can see why she might need a higher end plan with such long videos. $25/month may not be enough to cover the bandwidth.
What's confusing, though, is that their pricing page shows the highest-tier plan as $75/month, which is $900/year and described as "Unlimited live streaming - 7TB total storage". There's also the next plan down, at $50/month ($600/year), described as "No weekly Limits - 5TB total storage". So I'm curious where the $3500/year is coming from.
I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.
It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans.
Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean.
If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai.
I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.
Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for .
For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.
And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.
Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms.
The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo.
Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.
Streaming is $1 per 1000 minutes delivered
Storage is $5 per 1000 minutes store per month.
117 videos with 2 hours each and with 150 views each:
117 * 2 * 60 = 14040 minutes stored or $14/month for storage which is $168/year.
117 * 2 * 60 * 150 = 2106000 minutes delivered or $2106.
So $3500/year does not seem outrageous.
Considering the cost of bandwidth, you can't get that much better.
Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot of money for sure.
And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve the problem that this thread is about.
A simple video tag is good enough, you can store it on object storage (anyone but s3) . This she should do anyway for backup, any provider can kick her out for copyright violations and block her access to her own content.
Transcoding is not that difficult anymore video editing software allows you to transcode for the web directly . Unlike 5-10 years back every brower recognizes mp4 h264 today just one file is adequate.
An existing customer?
With no reasonable notice?
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?
However, it's essentially the same service otherwise. Point your customers or business partners to a URL and they stream it from there.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
It sounds almost like they've abandoned any attempt to find cost-savings through scale and they are heading towards being dependent on the services of an off-the-shelf developer-focussed competitor.