Vimeo, Bending Spoons, and What It Means for Freelance Motion Designers
Quick Answer
Vimeo was acquired by Bending Spoons in late 2025 for $1.38 billion. By January 2026, most of its staff had been laid off, including the entire video engineering team. The platform is still live and functioning for now, but the writing is on the wall. If you rely on Vimeo for your portfolio and client review workflow, now is a sensible time to audit your usage and quietly prepare a backup plan.
Real Talk
I have been using Vimeo since my uni days in the early 2000s. For a long time it was the obvious choice if you cared about how your work looked. Clean player, no ads, password-protected client links, reliable embeds. For a freelance motion designer, those things matter.
So when Vimeo announced it had been acquired by Milan-based tech company Bending Spoons in September 2025, I wrote about what it might mean. At the time, some of it was still speculative.
It is not speculative anymore.
By January 2026, Bending Spoons had confirmed a second round of mass layoffs. Former staff members described the scale as "gigantic." Reports from multiple outlets, including TechCrunch, PetaPixel, and Engadget, confirmed that the cuts included the entire video engineering team. The VP of Global Brand and Creative posted publicly that he, along with a large portion of the company, had been let go. A skeleton crew was reportedly asked to stay through April.
This post is an update on where things actually stand, and what I am doing about it.
What Happened and When
To understand where this is going, it helps to know how Bending Spoons operates. They are not a traditional tech company. They are closer to a private equity-style portfolio operation that buys legacy digital brands at reduced valuations, cuts costs aggressively, and attempts to extract value through efficiency rather than growth.
Their track record with previous acquisitions is fairly consistent. After buying WeTransfer in 2024, they cut 75% of staff and later attempted to use uploaded files to train AI models before walking that back following user backlash. At Evernote, cuts to staff and free tier features followed quickly after acquisition. Meetup, Brightcove, Eventbrite, AOL. The pattern is the same each time.
Vimeo was spun out as a public company in 2021 at a valuation of $8.5 billion. By the time Bending Spoons acquired it, that figure had fallen to $1.38 billion. Even at that price, they paid a 91% premium over Vimeo's 60-day average share price. The acquisition closed in November 2025. The first large-scale layoffs were confirmed on January 20, 2026.
What makes the January round notable is not just the scale. It is that Vimeo is a video hosting platform, and the entire video engineering team was among those let go. That is not routine cost-cutting. It is the removal of the people responsible for the core product.
What This Means If You Use Vimeo for Client Work
The platform is still running. Embeds still work. Password-protected links still function. Nothing has broken yet.
But here is the practical reality. A video platform running on a skeleton crew with no video engineering team is not a platform in growth mode. It is a platform in maintenance mode, at best. And maintenance mode, for a company like Bending Spoons, tends to mean one of three things over time: price increases, feature restrictions, or a slow degradation in reliability as technical debt mounts with no one left to address it.
There is also the AI training question, which remains unresolved. Vimeo made a public commitment in 2024 stating it would not use customer videos to train AI models. Bending Spoons has not explicitly affirmed that position since the acquisition. Given what happened with WeTransfer's terms of service update, this is worth watching closely if you are hosting confidential client work on the platform.
What I Am Actually Doing About It
I want to be straightforward here rather than alarmist. I have not deleted my Vimeo account and I am not telling you to either. But I am treating this as a prompt to tighten up a few things I probably should have done anyway.
Downloading local backups of everything. Any work I care about, whether it is campaign animations, showreel footage, or client projects, I am making sure I have a clean local copy. Not because Vimeo is about to disappear, but because relying on any single third-party platform without a backup is not smart practice.
Reviewing where Vimeo actually appears in my workflow. For me that is embeds on my site, client review links, and a handful of archived project files. Knowing exactly where it lives helps me prioritise what needs a backup plan and what does not.
Testing alternatives for client review. I have already been using Frame.io alongside Vimeo for review workflows. That is working well. For portfolio hosting, I am keeping Vimeo for now but watching performance closely.
Keeping an eye on the terms of service. If Bending Spoons updates Vimeo's ToS around content usage, that is the signal to act quickly, especially for anything involving confidential client work or brand campaigns.
What Are the Alternatives Worth Looking At?
A few options depending on your specific use case:
For client review and approval workflows, Frame.io is the obvious choice and many agencies are already familiar with it. Wipster is another option worth looking at.
For portfolio hosting where you want a clean, ad-free player, Wistia is polished and well-suited to professional portfolios, though pricing reflects that. Mux is worth knowing about if you have more technical requirements.
For general backup storage rather than active hosting, simply keeping high-quality exports in cloud storage alongside wherever you are actively hosting is a low-effort insurance policy.
None of these are perfect replacement for Vimeo in every respect. But having one or two tested alternatives ready means you are not making rushed decisions if Vimeo's reliability starts to slip.
Key Takeaway
Vimeo is not dead. But it is in a genuinely uncertain place. The company that made it what it was, the people who cared about creators, the engineering team that kept it running, most of them are gone. What remains is a brand being run lean by an acquisition firm. That might stabilise into something workable. Or it might not. Either way, making yourself less dependent on any single hosting platform is just good practice. Do it now, calmly, rather than later in a hurry.
FAQ
Is Vimeo shutting down? There is no indication it is shutting down imminently. Bending Spoons has stated they remain committed to the platform. But a video hosting company running without a video engineering team is operating in a significantly reduced capacity, and what that looks like in a year is genuinely unclear.
Should I migrate my portfolio off Vimeo now? Not necessarily now, but it is worth preparing. Download local copies of your important work, test an alternative host, and make sure your portfolio embeds have a fallback. That puts you in control regardless of what Bending Spoons decides next.
Will Vimeo use my videos to train AI? Vimeo published a position in 2024 stating they would not. That position has not been formally withdrawn, but Bending Spoons has not explicitly committed to it either. Given the WeTransfer precedent, this is worth monitoring. If you are hosting confidential client work, check the current terms of service directly rather than relying on older statements.
What is the best Vimeo alternative for a motion design portfolio? That depends on what you need. For client review, Frame.io is the most professionally appropriate option in my experience. For clean portfolio hosting with a quality player, Wistia is the closest like-for-like, though it is priced accordingly. Testing both before you need them is the sensible move.
Is Frame.io now owned by Adobe? Should I be worried about that too? Yes, Frame.io was acquired by Adobe in 2021. Adobe has had its own turbulent period including a blocked merger attempt with Figma. It is a fair question. No platform is immune to corporate upheaval. The practical answer is the same: do not build your entire workflow around any single tool without a backup plan.
