My take is that Vimeo is trying to increase their overall margins. So in these cases the options for the users are to convert to a higher margin custom plan -or- they remove them from service which also boosts overall margins by removing low margin customers.
Given the insignificant effort and marginal cost required by a profitable but low margin customer, the only customers they should refuse are unprofitable ones, which should never exist in the first place if they have reasonable pricing plans and accounting. Some theories:
- Formerly marginal customers have become unprofitable due to a cost increase, which might be caused by severe technical blunders.
- Someone is deliberately paid (or bullied) to increase margin, even if it means decreasing profit and goodwill, or to purge customers that don't fit a certain profile, or to hurt the "YouTube competitor" department within the company. This sort of "strategy" appears to imply a whole chain of command of idiots and/or sociopaths.
- Personnel is stretched so thin that instead of hiring they need to move staff from low-value video hosting (hurting what should be their main technical capability, hosting videos tout court) to profitable video hosting (or some bet on a new project).
