I’ve been a paying customer of Vimeo since 2014 – specifically, their Pro plan. But when my renewal email arrived in April, myself and other small developers were seeing sales slow down as the pandemic worsened. Another $240/year was a tough sell for the small amount of video content I was hosting with them, and I wondered if there might be a cheaper alternative – either another service or by hosting videos myself.

So this is how I moved off Vimeo and started hosting my own video content.

On average, my bandwidth bill has dropped to $11/month – and that includes videos, static assets, and ALSO binary downloads for all of my Mac apps. Previously, I was paying $20/month just for video hosting on top of the rest of my bandwidth.

It’s definitely a geekier solution that requires more work up front to setup, and I’m not sure I would recommend it for a “real” business, but for my needs it was a fun project and I’m happy to save $200 a year.

To keep myself sane while dealing with my work deadlines, I’ve found myself tinkering around with an idea I’ve wanted to try building for years now. Oddly enough, it’s not yet-another-app, but a website (web service, maybe?). And it’s actually something that’s designed to be self-hosted. I haven’t yet decided if it will (eventually) be open source, or if I might solicit feedback from friends (real and online) just in case it’s more useful than I think.

Sometimes the idea for something new comes in a flash of inspiration. And other times (as in the current case) it meanders around in the back of my head for years – just waiting for the right moment or combination of external factors.

For this project, it’s the result of the rebirth of the indie web movement, my long time interest in self-hosting and owning the tools and data I run my business with, and Apple’s WWDC announcements about Safari and their OS’s upcoming privacy improvements.