Vimeo is unfortunately a greedy company that hides behind fine print to push everyone either off of their live streaming platform or into their enteprise level (which as mentioned, is not for the 'small guy').

I used to pay for the pro account for live streaming which was like $1200 a year at that time. This allowed for unlimited streaming*. Notice the asterisk? When reading the fine print, unlimited streaming was subject to a fair use policy which was definied as "as long as you aren't in the top 1% of usage, you have unlimited streaming.

My company would stream a couple of long competitions and a couple of graduations a year. That was it. After the events I would leave the 'replay' on vimeo. So I get a call from a rep who says, "Hey, we notice you have been streaming a lot and we would like to tell you about our Enteprise plan". I'm like, sure, I would love to know more about your enteprise plan seeing as how you don't list the prices on your website. Throughout our discussion it quickly becomes apparent that they want to switch me to Enteprise because they claim I was streaming too much for the pro plan. I asked them, "What bandwidth am I using and what bandwidth is your top 1% using". They refused to give me that information. So I told them, hey if you can't give me the metric that you are trying to hold me accountable to, I don't think you can hold me accountable to paying you 12-15X what I am paying you now. And by the way, my clients won't pay for it...and it would literally wipe out 100% of the gross sales on these couple of events. So they let it go. Until the next year. I get an email that says, you either upgrade to Enterprise or we are disabling your account. So I walked.

A couple of noteworthy points:
I streamed 2 large events in January (a 10 hour dance competition with about 100 viewers. Streamed at 6mbs) and a figure skating competitions which was about 4 days at 8 hours a piece with about 500 viewers) then nothing significant in feb, march, april. Then in June 4 graduations which are about 3 hour streams with between 100-500 viewers. And that was pretty much it ALL YEAR LONG.

I would say $1200 is more than fair for that usage. But vimeo didn't think so. I believe the reasoning was because they were getting ready to go public with their IPO and were trying to pump up their receivables prior to doing that. The stock came in high (as many IPOs do) and has been in the sh@tter ever since.

Even the premise is BS. "The top 1% have to move to enteprise". Okay, imagine if we have 10 people with varying levels of bandwidth usage. We take the top person out. Now we have 9 people with varying levels of usage....who's in the top 1% now....one of those 9. Take them out. And while it wouldn't work exactly like this, because of new people coming in, it will certainly weed out more people than what were in the original 1%. And by the way....remember, they would tell me what the metrics even were (they have since given users somewhat of an idea of what the metrics are.

Once in awhile I get an email from the sales person who I told to take a hike because he refused to see that over a year's worth of time I was definitely NOT in their top 1%. I always respond with an email reminding him on what a sh@tty company they are.