Vimeo OTT in 2026: Fees, Setup and Life After Vimeo On Demand

On Demand closes on 20 November 2026

If you sell video through Vimeo, start with a date. Vimeo On Demand, the storefront where members sold and rented their films and series, stopped new purchases, subscriptions and renewals on 21 September 2026, and it shuts down completely on 20 November 2026 ^[1]. New On Demand pages can no longer be created. The help center sends anyone who wants to keep selling to Vimeo OTT, which Vimeo now also markets as Vimeo Streaming. There is no third route inside Vimeo. The regular Starter, Standard and Advanced plans host and play video, but none of them charges your viewers.

What buyers lose, and what they keep

On shutdown day, streaming access to every purchased title ends. Buyers keep only the copies they downloaded, and they could download a title only if the seller had switched downloads on. Purchases cannot be moved to another account, and the viewer terms already said that sales are final. Expect questions anyway. A buyer from years ago will feel let down. Tell your audience first, and tell them where the film will live next.

What sellers should do before November

The awkward part is the customer list. On Demand does not give sellers buyer names or contact details, shutdown or not. Only the emails of buyers who opted in can be exported. Do it now. The videos themselves are safe, because they live in your Vimeo account and return there as private videos when an On Demand page is deleted. The practical move is to open a free OTT seller account, connect it to your Vimeo account and import the catalog.

To honor past buyers, the Add Customer tool grants free access, and the seller terms settle what it costs. Granting a purchase or rental costs $1 once per title delivery, while granting subscription access costs $1 per subscriber a month for as long as it lasts, so price a large list before you invite it. The seller terms, dated 9 March 2026, still describe On Demand selling with no end date. The help center notices are newer. Plan by those.

What Vimeo OTT is, and what it is not

Vimeo OTT started life as VHX, took its current name in 2016, and runs as a separate product with its own login and admin. It gives you a branded storefront on your own domain or a subdomain, a checkout, a catalog built from collections and categories, and three ways to charge: subscriptions, one-off purchases and rentals, and, on Enterprise, ad-supported or free channels. Customers pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Link; PayPal and gift cards are not supported on the web checkout. Vimeo staffs viewer support around the clock, and you own the customer data, exportable as CSV at any time.

It is not a marketplace. Nobody browses Vimeo to discover your channel, so every visitor comes from your domain, your mailing list, social posts or ads. Outside the API, only a trailer can be embedded on another site, and buyers are sent to the OTT-hosted page to watch. Each site carries one subscription product, plus as many purchase and rental products as you like. You also publish your own terms, privacy policy and cookie policy. Once a site has made a sale, it can be unpublished but never deleted.

Starter and Enterprise: the two plans that count

The OTT pricing page lists two plans ^[2]. Starter has no upfront cost and charges only as you sell. It is web-only, covers subscriptions, purchases, rentals and free trials, handles pre-recorded video only, includes bandwidth and a checkout that accepts 100 currencies, and Vimeo answers your viewers' support emails. Enterprise is quoted by sales on an annual agreement. It adds branded apps, live events, a 24/7 linear channel, ad-supported and free channels, DRM, API and single sign-on access and advanced subscriber analytics, with volume discounts on the platform fee. Older Vimeo pages still mention a middle plan called Growth. The pricing page does not. Treat Growth as history.

Bandwidth is the quiet advantage. On Starter, the $1 subscriber fee covers unlimited bandwidth, however many people watch, unlike the regular Vimeo plans, where accounts that repeatedly pass 2TB a month hear from Vimeo. The Enterprise column lists a 60TB bandwidth allowance (what happens above it is not published, so ask sales), plus 200 upload hours, full HD 1080p and a Vimeo Advanced license. For a small creator, Starter is the obvious place to begin. Move to Enterprise when you need apps, live or migration help, not before.

What each sale really costs

OTT earns its money from fees, and the help center lays them out in one place ^[3]. The seller terms list the same core rates. Nothing is billed until you sell, grant access or buy upload time. The catch is that most lines below scale with your audience, and upload hours with your library, so model it at the subscriber count you expect in a year, not the one you have today. Here are the core fees.

The arithmetic on one subscriber

Take a subscription priced at $10 a month. The subscriber fee is $1, the card fee is $0.25 plus $0.30, and you keep $8.45 a month, by our arithmetic, before any sales tax or VAT. An annual subscriber at $100 a year is charged a $12 subscriber fee upfront, plus $2.50 and $0.30 in card fees, which leaves $85.20. A one-off purchase at $10 costs 10% plus $0.50, so $1.50 goes in fees and $8.50 stays with you. Free trial users cost nothing until they convert. A 100% off promo still triggers the subscriber fee. Giveaways cost money.

Upload hours and the small print

Upload hours are counted per site and cannot move between sites. They never expire, but they are not refundable, and deleting a video does not give the time back. Replacing a video uses hours again. Buying a second 10-hour pack costs the full $99 again, not the difference. Two of those packs cost $198 for 20 hours, by our arithmetic, while the $149 pack covers up to 25 hours on its own. Size your first purchase to the whole library. Refunds and chargebacks reduce your revenue, but the fees stay charged.

Setting up the subscription: trials, promos and gifts

A site cannot go live until a checklist is done: a product, a video, a collection, a category, a price and billing details. The subscription can be monthly, yearly or both. The help pages disagree on the yearly floor, $12.00 or $12.99 a year, while all agree on $1.99 a month. Stay above $12.99 a year. Price increases apply only to new subscribers; decreases can reach existing ones. Monthly web subscribers can pause for one, two or three months.

Trials and promos

Free trials run 3, 7, 14 or 30 days, and the trial on your website does not change the trial in branded apps. Promos work on subscriptions, with discounts in set steps from 10% to 100% for 1 to 12 months, and they apply after the trial ends. One help page also offers a Forever duration, so confirm with Vimeo before you promise one. Two limits catch sellers out. A discounted price cannot drop below $1.99 a month or $12.99 a year, so deep discounts on a cheap plan are blocked. And promos work only on web checkout, never on in-app purchases in branded apps. Coupons are the transactional version, percentage-only, with 100 free redemptions a month.

Gifts, pre-orders and screeners

Gifting is the surprise gap. It is unavailable on self-serve sites created after 1 March 2025, so a new Starter site will not have it. Where gifting does work, subscription gifts cover 1 to 12 months, capped at the annual price. The help pages also contradict each other on whether promo codes apply to gifts, so confirm with Vimeo. Pre-orders are simpler: buyers enter a card, see a $1 authorization hold, and are charged only when you release the title by hand. That release cannot be undone. Screeners give chosen recipients browser-only access for 1 to 90 days, with 100 free sends a month.

Getting paid: Stripe, payouts and taxes

Payments run on Stripe Connect, and payouts go by bank transfer once a month, on the 15th for the previous month ^[4]. You need a business representative with valid ID and a bank account in one of 40 listed countries; India and Brazil are not on the list. Verification can take up to 24 hours, and unverified sellers are not paid. Pick the payout country carefully. Stripe does not allow switching it later, so a move means a new OTT account. Currency costs too: a sale in a currency other than your payout currency carries a 2% fee per transaction, and non-USD payouts carry a foreign exchange fee.

Taxes are mostly handled for you, because Vimeo is the merchant of record. It collects and remits sales tax and VAT by customer location. For new international customers, tax sits inside your price: on a 10 GBP product at 20% VAT, the viewer pays 10 GBP and you receive 8.33 GBP. Price with tax included. Withholding is the trap. Without an approved tax form, payouts lose 28% of gross sales to the IRS, and that money does not come back. US sellers avoid this once a US bank account is connected; sellers abroad may lose up to 30% unless a tax treaty lowers it.

Branded apps are an Enterprise project

Branded apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Fire TV, Xbox, Samsung Tizen, LG and Vizio come only with Enterprise. Vimeo builds, submits and maintains them. Most apps publish under developer accounts you own, so they list your business name; the Samsung Tizen app runs in a Samsung group account that Vimeo manages. Apple charges a $99 annual developer fee and removes the app if the membership lapses. Apple and Google both need a D-U-N-S number, which takes 7 to 10 business days. Roku, Tizen and Xbox apps are add-ons on top of Enterprise. If a lapsed agreement blocks updates, purchases and renewals can fail.

App stores then change the money flow. In-app earnings are paid to you directly by Apple, Google and Roku, minus their commission. Apple takes 30% by default, or 15% under its Small Business Program for businesses earning up to $1 million a year. The card fee does not apply to in-app sales, but the per-subscriber fee does, charged to your card on file. You cannot cancel an app subscriber yourself, web price changes do not reach the apps automatically, and app fees continue even if a store removes your app over your content. The upside is reach. Vimeo says 58% of web sign-ups later add a mobile or TV device.

Live events on OTT: check your plan first

Here Vimeo's own pages disagree most. The pricing page says Starter is pre-recorded only and puts live events on Enterprise, and the main live help pages agree. Several older pages still say Growth sellers can go live. Since 1 February 2025, the Live Events tab is gone from the OTT dashboard; streams now run through Vimeo Events, which means connecting a Vimeo account on Advanced, or on Enterprise with the Events add-on, to an OTT Enterprise site with live enabled. Only the OTT account owner can connect the two. Confirm with Vimeo before you sell a ticket. Our Vimeo live streaming guide covers the events side in depth.

Once live is on, the tools are solid. You can sell a single event as live pay-per-view on a purchase product (rentals cannot include live), put the same event inside the subscription, or both. OTT live is capped at 1080p and at 12 hours per event unless you pay for extended streams. Chat, Q&A and polls run in the player, and DVR lets viewers pause or catch up. Extended 24/7 streams lose DVR and are not recorded, so they leave no replay. On a standard event, when the broadcast ends, the recording becomes an on-demand video that replaces the live event in the product automatically.

Analytics, and what Enterprise adds on top

Every plan gets a dashboard with revenue, subscribers, viewership and churn. Its revenue figure is an estimate, not a payout, because refunds and disputes can change it. You can add Google Analytics 4, pixels for Facebook, X and Google Ads, Segment, and webhooks for 24 customer events that feed Zapier or a CRM. There is no built-in email marketing. Chargebacks need a check too: one help page both promises a defense and says disputes are not actively challenged, and the buyer loses access at once. Confirm with Vimeo.

Enterprise layers more on top. Streaming Analytics, powered by NPAW, is an additional offering on some Enterprise plans, so check your contract. It adds engagement, business and audience hubs, with a paid add-on for acquisition and viewer-level data. One help page still lists user journeys as coming soon, so confirm. Enterprise also brings scheduled report exports, a cancellations report, auto-captions, Google Tag Manager and DRM as a paid per-video add-on. Standard seller support runs by contact form on weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern. Big audiences need more.

OTT next to Uscreen and Dacast

Uscreen is the closest rival for subscription creators. Its entry plan is listed at $49 a month with a 100-subscriber limit and no subscriber fee. Uscreen Growth is listed at $149 a month plus $1.99 per subscriber, and App Essentials at $449 a month plus $0.99 per subscriber, adding mobile apps. No billing period sits next to these rates; the calculator calls them yearly prices. At 300 paying members, that calculator puts both at $746 a month. By our arithmetic, 300 web subscribers on OTT Starter cost $300 a month in subscriber fees plus card fees and any upload-hour packs, with no upfront cost, no apps and no live. Uscreen says livestreaming is built in, one live hour included.

Dacast is a different shape: hosting and live streaming priced by bandwidth and storage. Its entry card shows $39 a month billed annually with 2.4 TB of bandwidth a year. Going over the bandwidth either stops streams or, with overage protection on, costs $0.30 per GB; extra storage is $0.15 per GB. Live sellers who budget by bandwidth should compare it closely, and check Dacast's own pages for paywall terms. Subscription catalogs forecast more simply on a per-subscriber fee. Our guide to Vimeo for creators looks at the rest of the creator toolkit.

The bottom line

Move now if you still sell on Vimeo On Demand: export your opted-in buyers, connect your Vimeo library to an OTT site so the catalog costs no upload hours, and decide on free access for past buyers before 20 November 2026. For a new channel, OTT Starter is a cheap way to sell subscriptions and titles on the web, as long as you price above the floors, budget for every fee, and file your tax form on day one. Branded apps, live events and serious analytics sit behind a quoted Enterprise contract, and live also needs a Vimeo Advanced account (or Enterprise with Events). Ask sales before promising anyone an app. For hosting plans, see our Vimeo pricing guide.