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Comment by bobitsaboy | Hacker News Reader

$3500 for hosting on top of what they already paid for hosting for the current length of their plan, with 7 days notice to vacate otherwise. And then how much next week? The week after that?

How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business after this?

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That 3500 is for a whole year. The per month cost is $300. That's 1.5% of the income that she gets from the videos.

Revenue, not income*

The amount almost doesn't matter (it's definitely on the high side compared to alternatives). They can definitely afford it if they have a reasonable budget. However, how Vimeo has treated them as a paying customer is terrible.

What alternatives have you looked at? It's fair priced imo.

Hvae you heard of Youtube?

They'll even pay for the videos instead.

Youtube is ad-supported. You can't upload videos more than 15 minutes long without letting Youtube put preroll and mid-roll ads all over them, and the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.

Creators don't want to force their paying Patreon supporters to watch ads for content that they paid for, and that can be leaked to the whole world if somebody merely ctrl-vs a bit of text.

> the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.

Google Workspace supports videos which are private to an organization, but it's annoying to use (you have to switch your active account to the Workspace one) and much, much more expensive than Vimeo's new pricing scheme if you used it just for private videos.

In the use case of this context, where the business (patreon creator) publishes a video, none of the viewers will be in a Workspace organisation, unfortunately.

They could invite every patron to a Workspace org. It'd just be a terrible (and expensive) way to do it.

I have many videos on YouTube, several over an hour long, and have only monetized one video with ads as an experiment. What do you mean you can’t upload videos without ads being put on them?

Since 2020, Youtube can put ads on all videos, even those that are not "monetized" by the uploader (in which case Youtube just keeps the revenue for itself). https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-is-showing-ads-o...

It's an ad supported video platform that will give data to google, advertise your competitors to your customers, distract your customers from your product by being an entertainment social network site, have relatively poor analytics, etc. It's a non-starter for many businesses.

But of course not using it only makes sense if you can monetize your videos yourself by selling it or another product.

When you upload on YT you are the product, YT sells you and your data and they profit. What vimeo is selling is hosting, saas, and bandwidth. They dont' profit at all except for what you pay them. vimeo comparatively to CDNs and SaaS hosting providers have a decent price. If you don't think so then hire someone to set up cloudflare stream and your own website.

To add, this is why people serious about their business generally will enter into contracts with other businesses to ensure either side can't screw each other over. And it provides a clear transition plan if one party wants to leave.

For something thats $200/yr no one would be offering that.

No but you would expect price changes like this to be given advanced notice and implemented only after a current contract ends

Then you'd pay more to use service that would if the corner stone of your business can crumble overnight.

What? Of course they would. Send salespeople over to your office to negotiate terms, probably not. Standard contract with clear statement of fees, durations, renewals, etc? Pretty much any subscription service will have that. VPS on an annual plan, for example.

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