Answer
Free video hosting without ads
for a portfolio.
Our free plan is a real answer to this question, and it is a small one: 5 GB of storage, one film at a time, no credit card. Within that allowance the player carries no ads, no suggested videos and no end screen. Past that allowance, the honest answer is somebody else.
Video hosting for filmmakers · 5 GB free · Paid plans from USD 9/month
Updated September 2026
The short answer
Our free plan is a real answer,
and it is a small one.
The free Starter plan holds 5 GB of storage and one film at a time, with no credit card and no trial countdown. Inside that allowance the player shows no ads, no suggested videos, no end screen and no logo except one you uploaded yourself. If your portfolio is more than one film, read the limits below before you sign up, because they are the part that decides this.
Most pages that answer this question sell you the virtues first. The limits are the useful part, so they go first here. Five gigabytes is not much video. A single short film exported at a high bitrate can fill it on its own, and the plan is capped at one film at a time whatever the sizes are. Deleting a film frees the slot and the space. There is no way to keep four films online for free on our side.
What you get in exchange is a player with nothing in it. There is no tier check anywhere in the player code, so the free plan renders the same component the paid plans render. Nothing is added when the film ends. Nothing is sold against your work while it plays.
5 GB
free storage
One film at a time, no credit card, no countdown
0
ads on any plan
No pre-roll, no overlay, no suggested videos, no end screen
1
logo the player can show
The one you upload; there is no platform badge
What no ads means at each host
Three free tiers,
published in three different places.
Read the modality in each cell. YouTube publishes a right and a may. Vimeo publishes a plain no, on the Free plan page specifically. We publish a player with nothing in it on any tier.
All competitor cells read from official vendor documentation on 7 September 2026 and listed in the sources below. No Vimeo price is quoted here because Vimeo's pricing tables did not render to a fetcher on that date.
The YouTube row is the one people get wrong in both directions. Its Terms grant YouTube the right to monetize your content, and its Help pages say ads may appear on videos in channels that are not in the Partner Program. That is a permission and a possibility, not a promise that a pre-roll runs on your reel tonight. It is still the wrong footing for a portfolio, because the decision is not yours and the documented controls do not include an off switch for a non-partner channel.
The end of the film is the other quiet problem. YouTube’s own player documentation states that related videos cannot be disabled, and that setting rel=0 limits them to the same channel rather than removing them. The old branding parameter is documented as deprecated with no effect. So on an embedded reel on your own site, the most you can do about other people’s work appearing next to yours is confine the related videos to your own channel.
The honest part
When the answer is that
you should use somebody else.
Five gigabytes and one film is a small allowance. For a portfolio of several finished films, our free tier will not carry it, and no amount of framing changes that.
Use YouTube if you need several films at zero cost
A director with six pieces and no budget is better served by unlisted YouTube uploads than by rotating one film through a 5 GB slot. YouTube publishes no account storage allowance, only a per-file cap of 256 GB or 12 hours. You pay in platform chrome, an undisableable related-video grid, a re-encode you do not control, and a monetization right written into the Terms.
Use YouTube if you want to be found
Search and recommendation are the actual product there. If the portfolio is doing discovery work rather than closing a producer who already has your link, that reach is worth more than a clean player. Many filmmakers run both: a discovery copy on YouTube, and the version on the resume somewhere that does not re-encode.
Use Vimeo Free if you need a grouped page of small files
Vimeo publishes no ads before, after or on your video on its Free plan, and Free accounts can create up to three showcases. That is a genuine ad-free portfolio page at no cost. The limits are that the account is capped at 1 GB for its lifetime, which is smaller than ours, and that the player carries Vimeo's branding: hiding the logo is a paid entitlement, and uploading your own needs Standard or higher.
Use us if it is one film that has to look right
The single case where a 5 GB slot is not a compromise: the reel you are sending this month, the festival cut, the one piece a producer will judge on image. It streams as exported, on a page with your name on it, with nothing else on the screen.
Do not use any free tier as storage
Our Terms say plainly that this is a delivery and hosting service, not a backup service, and that you should always keep your own copies of your masters. That applies to every host on this page. A portfolio host is a shop window, not an archive.
Do not expect a custom domain here
Every account gets its own address at yourname.uncompressed.io, provisioned automatically, plus the same page at uncompressed.io/yourname. There is no bring-your-own-domain feature, on free or paid. If pointing your own domain at the portfolio is a requirement, this is not the tool.
Included at zero
A full-featured plan,
not a stripped one.
The tiers differ in storage, not in features. Everything below is on the free plan exactly as it is on the paid ones.
No transcode, no ceilings
The file is stored as you uploaded it and served as you uploaded it. There is no bitrate ceiling and no resolution ceiling. The published ceiling on a single file is 50 GB, well past what fits in the free allowance anyway.
Your own portfolio address
yourname.uncompressed.io is provisioned at signup. The page builds itself from the films you have uploaded: tag one Hero and it runs full width, tag two Featured and they sit side by side, everything else lands three across.
Clean links per film
Each film gets a readable slug rather than an ID string, short enough for an email signature and a festival form. Replace the file later and the link does not move.
Original-file downloads
One switch per film hands the viewer the exact object you uploaded, byte for byte. Off by default, and no link is generated while it is off. It is not a paid feature here.
No metered viewers
Our Terms state that storage is the only meter, that there are no bandwidth caps, and that streaming is unlimited on every plan. On this plan you are working against 5 GB of storage, not against plays.
Nothing trained on your work
A clause in our Terms, not a settings toggle: your files, frames, audio, captions and comments are not used to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine-learning or AI model, and any change to that clause is announced 30 days in advance.
Setup
Three steps
from an export to a link.
Nothing below needs a card, and nothing below is gated behind a trial.
Export for a browser
Use an H.264, HEVC or AV1 export in MP4 or MOV. Whether a given file plays is decided by the viewer's browser and hardware, not by a rule on our side, so test a short export with the person who matters most.
Upload the one film
Drag it in. Uploads are resumable and survive navigation. A poster frame is captured automatically, and you can replace it with the exact frame you want fronting the film.
Send the link
Share the film's page or your portfolio address. Recut later and replace the file in place: the address, the embed and the share card all keep working.
Two policies worth reading before you rely on a free account
Our Terms reserve the right to clear videos on free accounts after 90 days of inactivity, and state that paid accounts are never purged. The same Terms state that this is a delivery and hosting service rather than a backup service, and that you should keep your own copies of your masters. Both are published policy and both are worth reading in full on the Terms page. If you are weighing where a whole portfolio should live rather than a single film, the longer comparison is in our guide to video portfolio hosting.
Questions
Frequently asked
What is the best free video hosting without ads for a portfolio?
It depends on how many films you need online. For a single film that has to look exactly as exported, our free Starter plan holds 5 GB and one film at a time, with no ads, no suggested videos and no branding on the player. For several films at zero cost, YouTube is the practical answer, at the price of platform chrome and a right to monetize written into its Terms. Vimeo's Free plan publishes 'No ads before, after, or on your video' but caps the account at 1 GB for its lifetime and keeps player-logo removal behind its paid plans.
Does the free plan put a watermark or a logo on my video?
No. The player is the same component on the free plan as on the paid ones, with no tier check in it: no platform logo, no watermark, no ads, no related-video rail and no end screen. The only logo it can render is one you uploaded yourself. One caveat worth stating: if an embed points at a film that is deleted, private or password-gated, the browser shows a small error card that carries our name. That is an error state, not the player.
How many films fit in 5 GB?
That is the whole question, and it is decided by your export bitrate, not by us. A short film exported at a high bitrate can fill the allowance on its own. The free plan is also capped at one film at a time regardless of size, so it is built for the single piece you are showing right now. Delete that film to upload another, or move to a paid plan for room to keep several online.
Is there a time limit or a trial countdown on the free plan?
No. There is no trial period, no countdown and no credit card. The one policy attached to free accounts is in our Terms, which reserve the right to clear videos on free accounts after 90 days of inactivity and state that paid accounts are never purged.
Does the free plan limit how many people can watch?
No. Our Terms state that storage is the only meter, that there are no bandwidth caps, and that streaming is unlimited on every plan. On the free plan the meter you are actually working against is the 5 GB of storage and the one-film limit, not the number of viewers or plays.
Can a producer download the actual file?
Only if you turn it on, and it is a switch per film rather than a paid feature. With it on, the viewer gets the exact object you uploaded, byte for byte, with no repackaging. With it off, no download link is generated at all.
Will my file be re-encoded on the free plan?
No, and there is no encode step anywhere on our side, at upload or at playback. YouTube publishes the opposite plainly: it always re-encodes videos to optimize their playback quality. Vimeo transcodes uploads into its own delivery ladder, whose published 4K maximum is 22 Mbps.
Put one film up and look at it
The free plan holds 5 GB and one film at a time, with no credit card. Upload a browser-compatible export, open the page on a phone, and see whether an unbranded player is worth the size limit before you pay anyone anything.
Sources
- 1.YouTube Terms of Service, Right to Monetize (fetched 2026-09-07; grants YouTube the right to monetize Content, including displaying ads on or within Content)
- 2.Ads on YouTube videos, YouTube Help (fetched 2026-09-07; ads may appear on uploaded videos not monetized by the creator, and on channels not in the Partner Program)
- 3.YouTube embedded player parameters, YouTube for Developers (fetched 2026-09-07; related videos cannot be disabled, rel=0 limits them to the same channel, modestbranding is deprecated)
- 4.Upload videos, YouTube Help (fetched 2026-09-07; maximum file size of 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less)
- 5.Recommended upload encoding settings and specifications, YouTube Help (fetched 2026-09-07; YouTube always re-encodes videos to optimize their playback quality)
- 6.About the Vimeo Free plan, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; up to 1 GB of content for the account's lifetime, and no ads before, after, or on your video)
- 7.About Vimeo plans, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; plan comparison lists 1 GB storage for Free and 2 TB for Starter)
- 8.Embedding features by plan type, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; showing or hiding the Vimeo logo, and choosing what displays after playback, are paid-plan entitlements)
- 9.How to upload and display a custom logo, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; a custom player logo requires Standard, Advanced, Pro, Business, Premium or Enterprise)
- 10.Showcases feature access by account type, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; Free and Basic accounts can create up to three showcases)
- 11.Guidelines for determining playback resolution, Vimeo Help Center (fetched 2026-09-07; published 4K maximum playback bitrate of 22 Mbps, listed bitrates are maximums)
- 12.uncompressed.io Terms of Service (fetched 2026-09-07; storage is the only meter, no bandwidth caps, 5 GB free plan, 90-day inactivity policy on free accounts)