Frame.io alternatives
A Frame.io alternative for final client delivery.
One file, one client, no seat.
Frame.io is priced and built for review cycles: members, projects, and storage that grows with the member count. Final delivery is the opposite shape of problem. One finished file, one client, nobody who needs an account, and a page that should still work next year. This page compares the two jobs honestly, and says plainly when to keep Frame.io.
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Updated September 2026
Two different jobs
Review is a room full of people;
delivery is a page that outlives it.
Frame.io sells itself as world-class review and approval, and that is a fair description of what it is. Its price follows the shape of that job: you pay per member, per month, and the storage you get grows as you add members. That is a rational way to price a room where several people work every day. It is a strange way to price the last five minutes of a project, when one finished file goes to one client who will never log in.
The review job
Several named people, many versions, comments in both directions, a project that closes when the grade is approved. Members are the unit that matters, because members are what is being bought. Frame.io is built exactly around this and does it well.
The delivery job
One export, one master, one recipient, and a link you want to still answer in eighteen months. Nobody needs an account. Nobody needs a comment field. The only resource being consumed is the space the file occupies and the plays it serves.
Why the bills diverge
Review cost scales with people, and storage rides along with the member count. Delivery cost should scale with bytes, because bytes are the only thing delivery consumes. Paying a per-member rate to park finished work is paying for the wrong meter.
What does not diverge
Both jobs need the original file to survive the trip. Frame.io keeps the original for download, and so do we. This page is not the one that claims your master is unsafe somewhere else, because that is not true.
The two price shapes
Per member, per month,
against a flat plan rate.
$15
Frame.io Pro, per member
Up to 5 members. 2 TB of storage, plus 2 TB for each added member. Annual billing saves 13 percent.
$25
Frame.io Team, per member
Up to 15 members. 3 TB of storage, plus 2 TB for each added member. Frame.io marks this plan most popular.
$9
Lite here, flat
100 GB hot, or $90 a year. The price does not move when a second person on your team needs access to the same library.
$25
Pro here, flat
500 GB hot, or $250 a year. The same figure as one Frame.io Team member, except that here it is the whole bill.
Read the storage lines carefully, because they are the part that surprises people. On Frame.io, storage is attached to members: 2 TB on Pro and 3 TB on Team, then 2 TB more for each member you add. That coupling is generous while your team is growing and awkward when it is not. A two-person post house that needs more room has one supported way to get it inside the plan, which is to buy a member it does not have, or to buy extra storage in 250 GB increments whose price Frame.io does not publish.
The failure mode at the top of the plan is worth knowing before you find it. Frame.io says the application will warn you about which limit you have exceeded and that you then have a brief window of time to meet your current plan limits or upgrade. Its help center is blunter: accounts that exceed plan limits are subject to being locked. For a review room mid-project that is an unpleasant afternoon. For an archive of delivery links you have handed to fifty clients over three years, a lock is a different order of problem, because the thing at risk is not your workflow, it is their access.
Side by side
What the client actually opens,
and what it costs to leave it up.
Frame.io figures from frame.io/pricing and the Frame.io help center, fetched 3 September 2026. uncompressed.io figures are our own plan rates. There is no platform branding on any uncompressed.io plan.
The row that matters most is the second one, and it is easy to overstate, so here it is precisely. Frame.io does not throw your master away. It makes an HTML5 encode for the browser and keeps the original file available for download beside it. That is a sound design for review, where fast scrubbing beats fidelity. Our difference is narrow: we do not make a second copy at all, so the file the client plays is the file you uploaded, at the bitrate you exported it at. There is no encode to inspect, no ladder to argue with, and no gap between what you approved and what they saw.
The second row that matters is the seat row, and this is where competitor pages usually lie. A Frame.io client does not need to buy anything to watch your cut. Reviewers are free, have no login, and are explicitly designed for exactly that. The per-member cost sits on your side of the table. So the argument for moving delivery is not that Frame.io charges your client. It is that a review platform prices your whole account by the member, and a finished delivery consumes no member at all.
Honest framing
When Frame.io is the right answer,
do not move it.
Frame.io is the better review product. That is not a concession made to sound reasonable, it is the reason this page is scoped to delivery and nothing else. There are three cases where the right decision is to stay, and one of them is common enough that most readers should probably stop here.
Your work is review rounds with an agency
If the daily reality is versions, notes from four people, and approvals that have to be traceable, keep Frame.io. That is the job it was designed for, it has years of refinement on it, and moving your rounds to save a monthly rate is a bad trade against the hours a smoother round saves.
Your team needs Camera to Cloud
There is no equivalent here, and no honest way to describe one. Frame.io's C2C has no limit on connected devices. Note the plan lines: all plans can upload 4K, 4K playback is on Pro, Team and Enterprise, 10-bit HDR playback is Enterprise only, and a single asset upload expires if it takes over 24 hours. If C2C is in your workflow, that decision is already made.
You already pay for the members
If five people are in Frame.io projects every day, the member rate is buying something real, and adding delivery pages to an account you already run is cheap in effort. The case for splitting delivery out gets strong when the seats exist for review and the storage is being eaten by finished work nobody is reviewing any more.
What we are actually claiming
The handoff
How a delivery goes out
without a seat in it.
Finish to a delivery codec
Export the approved cut in H.264 or HEVC at the bitrate you want seen. Browser-decodable codecs are what stream, and the player streams the exact bytes you upload, so a 150 Mbps export plays at 150 Mbps rather than at whatever a platform's ladder decides.
Put the master beside it
ProRes 422, ProRes 4444 and DNxHR are hosted for download rather than for streaming, because no browser decodes them. The client plays the export and pulls the master when you allow it, which is the same two-file shape Frame.io ends up with, minus the encode.
Send one link
The client opens a page and presses play. No account, no install, no seat consumed, and no platform branding on any plan. If a job needs it locked down harder, Vault masters are native-app only, screen-capture blocked and session-watermarked.
Leave it up
Storage is the only meter, and no bandwidth is metered on any plan, so a page that keeps getting played does not keep getting more expensive. When a delivery goes quiet for good, Max and Vault can move the master to cold storage at $20 per TB a month instead of deleting it.
The arithmetic for a small shop is unremarkable, which is the point. A hundred gigabytes of delivery exports and masters is $9 a month here, and five hundred is $25. On Frame.io the same library sits inside a plan priced at $15 or $25 per member per month, where the storage number moves when your headcount moves. If your headcount is the thing driving your storage needs, that coupling is fine. If your finished-work library is the thing growing, it is a meter pointed at the wrong quantity.
One more caveat that belongs on any page about big files. 8K plays when the viewer’s hardware decodes it, and camera RAW is never streamed by anyone; the honest workflow is to finish to HEVC or ProRes and upload that. Delivery is not the place to discover which of those a client’s laptop can handle, so pick the delivery codec for the person who has to press play, not for the person who cut it.
Questions
Frequently asked
Does my client need to pay for a Frame.io seat to watch the final cut?
No, and any page that tells you otherwise is wrong. Frame.io describes a Reviewer as a user whose sole purpose is reviewing or viewing content shared with them through a Review Link or a Presentation Link, states it is 100% free, and states they will not have a login or password for Frame.io. Team Members and Collaborators are the paid, account-level seats with their own login. The per-member price is a cost on your side of the table, not on the client's.
Does Frame.io keep my original file, or only a compressed copy?
It keeps the original. Frame.io's own help center says it encodes the files into HTML5 videos to play seamlessly on the web while still storing the original file available for download. So the master is there. The difference here is narrower and more specific: we make no transcode at all, so the thing that plays in the browser is the master itself, the exact bytes you uploaded.
Is the Frame.io free plan enough to hand one film to one client?
Sometimes, for a while. Free gives you 2 GB of storage, up to 2 members and up to 2 projects. One 4K delivery export and its master will often pass 2 GB on their own, and every delivered job you leave up occupies a project slot. Free is a trial of the review product, not a place to park finished work.
What happens if I go over Frame.io's storage limit?
Frame.io's pricing page says the application will warn you about which limit you've exceeded, and that you will then have a brief window of time to meet your current plan limits or upgrade to a higher plan. Its help center adds that accounts that exceed plan limits are subject to being locked. Extra storage is sold in 250 GB increments; Frame.io does not publish a price for the increment, so budget for it by asking, not by guessing.
Can I stream a ProRes master to a client here?
No, and nobody can. Browsers do not decode ProRes. ProRes 422, ProRes 4444 and DNxHR are hosted here for the client to download, not to stream. The honest delivery workflow is to finish to H.264 or HEVC at the bitrate you want seen, upload that as the file that plays, and keep the ProRes master beside it as the download.
Do I pay more when a client watches the film ten times?
No. Storage is the only meter here. No bandwidth is metered on any plan, including the free one, so a page that gets played once and a page that gets played by a whole marketing department cost the same. Your bill moves when your library grows, not when your work gets watched.
Can I run review in Frame.io and delivery here?
Yes, and for a lot of teams that is the right split. Frame.io holds the rounds with the agency, and the finished film goes to a delivery page that costs a flat plan rate and does not consume a review seat or a project slot. There is a review room here with versions and timecoded comments if you want both in one place, but this page is not arguing that it beats Frame.io at review.
Delivery priced as storage, not as seats
Lite is $9 a month or $90 a year for 100 GB hot. Pro is $25 or $250 for 500 GB. No bandwidth is metered on any plan, including free, and there is no platform branding on any plan.
Sources
- 1.Frame.io pricing: Free, Pro and Team plans, member counts, storage, annual discount, and what happens over a plan limit (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 2.Frame.io Help Center: getting started, what are the pricing plans you offer (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 3.Frame.io Help Center: adding storage to my account (250 GB increments, accounts subject to being locked) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 4.Frame.io Help Center: uploading your media (files encoded into HTML5 videos while the original is still stored and available for download) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 5.Frame.io Help Center: shares in Frame.io (Public and Secure sharing, name and email on a public share) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 6.Frame.io Support: what is a user (Reviewers are free and have no login; Team Members and Collaborators are paid seats) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 7.Frame.io Help Center: Camera to Cloud FAQs (no limit on connected devices, 4K playback by plan, 10-bit HDR playback on Enterprise) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 8.Frame.io: capture, review, deliver (product positioning) (fetched 3 September 2026)
- 9.uncompressed.io pricing: plans, hot and cold storage, and storage blocks