TLDR: Vimeo will hold your video's continued availability hostage if you choose to downgrade before your free trial ends – even if the plan you're downgrading to has the same storage limits. They'll also charge you before your trial ends.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Needing more storage, I sign up for their Standard free trial (yearly billing). I know I will likely want the monthly plan, but the yearly plan is the only one that offers a trial. I figure I'll test drive the features for a few days, and I schedule in my calendar to switch from yearly to monthly billing before the trial ends. I receive an email with the following assurance:

> You will not be charged for your Standard plan until your free trial ends on Sep 3, 2024.

2. On Sep 2, 2024 – a day before the date they quoted me – my bank account gets charged the full $240.

3. I rush to the Vimeo dashboard to see what happened. No sign of any charge, and according to their dashboard I'm still on my trial. For good measure, I disable auto-renew.

4. I'll deal with this false charge later – first, it's time to downgrade to monthly billing... Only there's absolutely no way to do this. According to their help docs, you need to contact support to downgrade your plan. And you need to do it a full 24 hours before your renewal. I reach out to support.

5. Support tells me there's no way they can switch me to monthly. I'll have to resubscribe once my service lapses. Crucially, that means my pro features – specifically larger video storage – will be unavailable during that time. This is a huge problem, as my videos are in the shipped stage, and a link not working, even temporarily, would be very bad.

This is so obviously designed in a shady way. From the day-early charge, to the inability to downgrade without emailing support, to the threat of having videos temporarily unavailable if you choose to downgrade. I used to like Vimeo for their design and commitment to independent filmmakers, but this is intentionally convoluted and predatory.

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user:	fratlas
created:	December 22, 2015
karma:	662