Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos — .Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos — Patreon itself didn’t offer video hosting, and YouTube didn’t have the same features to protect her work, like controlling where her videos could be embedded.“I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” van Baarle says. “But I thought, well, it’s a quality platform.” She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average, van Baarle says. Her most viewed video has around 815 views.So the notice Vimeo sent van Baarle on March 11th shocked her. Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users, the company said, and if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.“I’ve never had it where a platform reached out to me and was like, ‘Pay up, or get off our platform,’ basically,” she says.Van Baarle is far from alone in her experience. Several Patreon creators have received the same message from Vimeo in recent months, causing a tailspin of confusion and panic over potentially losing their video work. The ultimatums to indie video creators come as Vimeo is shifting focus toward large corporate clients — leaving longtime Vimeo users to scramble for an alternative.Channel 5, a popular account doing man-on-the-street-style interviews, received a similar message in January. In a post on Patreon titled, “Vimeo is holding our Patreon catalogue hostage (an explanation),” Channel 5 creators say that upon returning from a trip they saw that their videos had disappeared from the Patreon feed, resulting in hundreds of angry messages and the loss of “500+” subscribers.Screenshots posted by Channel 5 show their price for a new custom plan starting at $7,000 a year, and that an upgrade or migration off of Vimeo was required.Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player and thumbnail image, downloading, and livestreaming, according to the company’s website. Overage charges aren’t imposed unless an account reaches “unusually high levels,” or is in the 99 percentile of users. Vimeo places that threshold at around 2 to 3 TB per month. In communication with affected creators, Vimeo isn’t shy about its policy to charge top creators more.“On some high consumption accounts (including your account), Vimeo has been losing money supporting its usage,” read email notices from company representatives. “This has become problematic for our leadership team and they made the decision to implement a fair use policy in which we reserve the right to charge the top 1% of bandwidth-consuming accounts based on the amount of bandwidth they are utilizing.”In a statement to The Verge, Vimeo’s head of communications Matt Anchin says that when a user reaches the threshold, the company works with creators to accommodate their higher bandwidth needs.“Our goal will always be to provide the best video solution possible and work with our users so they can continue to reach their audiences in high quality,” Anchin says. The company noted that over 70 percent of users flagged for excessive bandwidth choose to either upgrade to a custom plan or lower their bandwidth usage.Over the past four to five years, Vimeo has made a hard pivot away from being the YouTube alternative th...