Is Wistia Free? What the Free Plan Includes, Limits and Costs

Yes, Wistia is free, with four hard limits

Wistia has a real Free plan at $0 a month, with no trial clock. It gives one user 25 GB of storage, 200 GB of bandwidth a month, 3,000 credits granted once, basic analytics and the recording studio and editor, but the player always carries Wistia branding.^[1] That is enough to host a modest library and embed it on a website. It is not enough for lead capture: CTAs, forms, heatmaps, A/B tests and CSV export all start on Business. Free is a hosting plan, not a marketing plan. If your videos exist to collect leads, you will pay.

The table reflects the plans Wistia introduced on 17 March 2026, which are sold by storage. Older help pages and blog posts still describe free accounts by video count, with figures such as 10 uploads, because the earlier plans capped the number of media. Those counts belong to Legacy plans. A new free account today is limited by gigabytes, not by how many videos you upload, so a library of many short clips fits as long as the total stays under 25 GB.

The four limits that decide whether Free works

Storage is the first wall. Free cannot exceed 25 GB, and you cannot buy extra storage on it.^[2] Archived videos still count toward the total; only permanent deletion frees space. Paid plans behave differently: going over simply adds the next storage block to the bill. On Free there is no block to add, so a library that grows past the cap means deleting media or upgrading. Plan for the size of your original files, since that is what fills the quota.

Bandwidth matters more than most people expect. The 200 GB a month counts every play, but also player and thumbnail loading, internal views and downloads. Video thumbnails and autoplay start streaming as soon as a page loads, before anyone clicks. A single autoplaying header on a busy landing page can burn through a free allowance far faster than the same video behind a click.

Users are fixed at one. Free accounts get one Account Owner and nobody else; even free Viewer seats, which paid plans offer for colleagues who only watch, are not available. A two-person marketing team is already outside the plan. That rules out most teams. Business includes three users for one account price, so a second person, rather than storage or bandwidth, is often what forces the first upgrade.

Credits are the quiet limit. The 3,000 credits arrive once and are never refilled, unlike Business, which grants 5,000 every month. Hosting, playback and automated transcripts never use credits, so a plain hosting account may never touch them. For scale, professional captions cost 1,000 credits a minute, so the whole balance equals three minutes of that work. Dubbing is not on Free at all.

What happens when you hit a limit

The bandwidth rule is the one that can hurt a live website. Free plans cannot run overages or buy extra bandwidth. When you pass 200 GB, Wistia emails the Account Owner and embeds keep playing for a few days. After that grace period, embedded videos stop playing until bandwidth resets at the start of the next billing month, and viewers see a message with the return date.^[3] Upgrading restores playback sooner. A viral month on Free can switch off your videos.

Paid plans handle the same overrun with a bill instead of a pause. Bandwidth beyond the allowance is billed per GB on the monthly billing date, and storage overages are added in blocks, even on annual plans. Only an Account Owner can manage a bandwidth subscription. That is the real trade. Free protects your wallet and risks your embeds, while Business protects your embeds and risks a larger bill.

Storage behaves more gently. At 25 GB, the account cannot grow further until you delete media for good or upgrade, and archiving does not count as deleting. Moving the other way has a catch too. A paid account cannot downgrade to Free until its storage is under 25 GB, so trim the library before you switch. Media stops being accessible after cancelling, so export what you want to keep first.

What Free leaves out

Beyond the four limits, several features are gated to paid plans. Free has no CTAs or forms, so you cannot gate a video behind an email field or add a booking button at the end. Heatmaps, which show how each viewer watched, are paid, as are A/B tests and CSV export. Publishing straight to YouTube is disabled on Free and on trials. Custom media page URLs are paid only, and Free users who try them get an upgrade prompt. Free also allows only one brand bumper, the short branded intro or outro.

Free still includes more than a bare player. The recording studio, transcript-based editing, the agentic Remix editor (in beta), AI highlights and social clips are on all plans, and automated transcripts are free everywhere. One motion kit is included against three on Business. Marketing-automation sync is a different matter: engagement data in HubSpot, Marketo or Pardot needs Signals, which plain Business does not include either (details in our Wistia pricing guide). Webinars are separate plans as well, starting at $429 a month billed annually or $537 billed monthly.

When paying is worth it

The trigger is usually a feature, not a limit. The day you need a lead form, a second user or a player without the Wistia logo, Free is over. Business costs $79 a month billed annually, or $948 a year by our arithmetic, against $99 billed monthly, and it includes three users. A fourth user costs $25 a month on annual billing or $31.25 on monthly.

The billing term needs its own sum. Nine months at the monthly rate cost $891, below the $948 annual bill; ten months cost $990, above it. So pay monthly if you expect to stop within nine months and annually only past that. There are no refunds for cancellations, downgrades or unused time. Plans renew automatically, and Wistia's Terms ask for notice at least two months before an annual term ends to stop the renewal. Try first: the Business trial runs 14 days and needs no card.

Developers who only need hosting behind their own player have a third route. The Developer plan stays free until 25 GB of storage or 200 GB of bandwidth, then charges a $25 monthly platform fee plus usage: $0.05 per GB of storage above 25 GB and $0.08 per GB of bandwidth above 200 GB in the first tiers. Take a month with 100 GB stored and 500 GB delivered. That month's bill comes to the $25 monthly platform fee plus $3.75 for storage plus $24 for bandwidth, or $52.75 for the month, by our arithmetic. Support there is the documentation and a bug report form, with no account manager.

How Free compares with other free video tools

Several rival free plans cap recordings rather than hosting. Loom's free Starter plan allows up to 25 videos per person, five-minute recordings and 720p video. Vidyard's Free plan allows five recorded videos a month, each up to 30 minutes. Descript's Free plan gives 5 GB of cloud storage and 60 media minutes a month. Wistia's Free plan counts gigabytes instead, which suits a small library of finished marketing videos better than daily screen recordings.

Vimeo also has a free plan, and its paid tiers are priced per seat: Starter is $12 a seat a month billed annually or $20 monthly. On Vimeo, lead capture and CTAs start with Standard at $25 a seat a month billed annually or $41 monthly. Wistia charges one account price instead: Business covers three users, and each extra user costs $25 a month on annual billing. Neither model wins by default. Vimeo prices per seat, so confirm the checkout total for your headcount at the feature level you need. For the paid comparison, see Vimeo vs Wistia; for the wider field, our Wistia alternatives roundup.

The bottom line

Wistia is free for one person hosting up to 25 GB of video with 200 GB of monthly bandwidth, and that is a usable plan for a portfolio, a help library or a few landing-page embeds. It breaks the moment you need lead capture, teammates, a clean player or traffic you cannot predict, because Free embeds stop playing after the bandwidth grace period. Start free, watch the bandwidth meter, and move to Business when the first lead form or second user appears.