A Vimeo alternative with no bandwidth cap.
The 2 TB meter, counted in plays.

Bandwidth, in Vimeo’s sense, is the bytes its servers send to viewers: every play of every film, added up across the month. Storage is what you keep; bandwidth is what people watch. A library can sit inside 2 TB of storage for years and cross 2 TB of delivery in one good week.

The threshold belongs to the account, not to the video, and Vimeo’s pricing FAQ extends it to all jointly controlled accounts: opening multiple accounts does not increase the limit. Two Starter plans buy two lots of storage and one meter.

Here the meter does not exist. The Terms state that storage is the only meter, that there are no bandwidth caps and that streaming is unlimited on every plan; the pricing page says it in plainer words, unlimited views, uploads and viewers on every tier, the free one included. The rest of this page is what that difference is worth in numbers, and to whom.

One caveat keeps the table honest. Vimeo does not serve your master; it serves a transcode of it, and its playback guidelines cap H.264 at 7 Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps, 12 Mbps for 2K and 22 Mbps for 4K, with HEVC 4K at 16 Mbps, every one of them stated as a maximum. At the 4K ceiling an hour of viewing moves about 10 GB: 22 megabits a second, times 3,600 seconds, rounded. On Vimeo the bytes per play are set by that ladder, not by your export, so a 20 GB master delivered as a 22 Mbps rendition costs the meter less than 20 GB per play. What it costs the viewer is everything above 22 Mbps.

So the plays column is a ceiling on Vimeo, for a full-quality stream it never delivers, and plain arithmetic here, where the exact bytes you uploaded reach every viewer and nothing counts them. The first row is the one to remember. A 2 GB short, 1,000 plays, and the month is spent; for a short film that is a good month, not a viral one. How a bitrate turns into a file size is covered in the bitrate guide, and the calculator does the division for your own masters.

The honest summary for a working filmmaker: Vimeo sells bandwidth at $4,800 a year for 36 TB, or through a sales call priced on how much you expect to be watched. What it does not sell is a self-serve plan on which a good month costs nothing extra.

Read the storage row first, because it is where Vimeo is plainly the better value. Starter puts 2 TB of storage behind $12 a month; Lite here puts 100 GB behind $9, and the 2 TB of hot storage on Vault costs $250 a month. If a large library with modest viewing is the job, Vimeo’s storage per dollar wins, and this page will not argue otherwise.

The delivery rows are the reverse. Vimeo’s self-serve plans meter 2 TB a month and never more; Studio lifts it to 36 TB a year for $4,800; beyond that the price depends on expected bandwidth. Here, in the words of the Terms, the plan is defined by how much you store, not by how much your videos are watched, so the busiest month of the year and the quietest cost the same. A 100 GB master watched twenty times on Vimeo has spent the month. Watched two hundred times here, it has spent nothing.

The rest of the comparison, player, review room, transcode and import, is at uncompressed.io vs Vimeo. The bitrate side of the argument, what a viewer actually sees at 22 Mbps against the master, has its own page.

The account with no good answer on Vimeo is the one right at the line: two busy months in a year, or one very busy month past 10 TB. It gets the notifications, the seven-day window and the choice between lowering consumption and a sales conversation, in the month the work is finally being watched. That is the wrong week to migrate a library, which is why the sensible order is to move before the good month, not during it. The import here runs server to server, with nothing re-encoded, and is described in moving Vimeo videos without re-uploading. Keep the Vimeo account alive while links are swapped, then cancel when nothing points at it; the migration guide has the order of operations.