Vimeo On Demand alternatives

Uscreen rebuilds the part of Vimeo On Demand that mattered most: a store, under your own brand, where a viewer can rent a title, buy it outright, or take a bundle. Its help docs spell out all three, rental durations including a two-week window, one-time purchases with lifetime access, and bundles as a single payment, and you can layer a subscription on top of the same catalog if you decide to. Where VOD gave you a page inside Vimeo, Uscreen gives you a site, a checkout and, from the App Essentials plan, your own iOS and Android apps at a published $449 a month.

Read the pricing as a stack. Starter is $49 a month but caps you at 100 subscribers on a Uscreen-branded domain, so it is a way to test. Growth ($149 a month billed annually) removes the cap and adds a custom domain, but layers a $1.99 fee per subscriber a month; App Essentials drops that to $0.99 and includes the apps. That per-subscriber model is built for a recurring library, so if your sales are a handful of one-time rentals a month, you are paying store rent for a market stall. The upside is that Uscreen takes no separate cut of each web sale, so a high-priced purchase keeps more than it would on a percentage platform.

For a seller facing a hard shutdown date, the migration matters as much as the features. Uscreen runs a free migrations team that moves your content, and it is the one option here that treats "I am leaving another platform" as the normal way in rather than a support ticket. The limit to plan around is the top of the range: the full community toolkit and TV apps sit on the quote-only Custom plan, so the highest tier brings back the sales call you were escaping.

Kinema is the one platform here built specifically for the kind of title Vimeo On Demand was famous for: an indie feature or a documentary. It handles VOD rentals the way VOD did, you set your own price and Kinema takes a flat 99 cents per rental, covering unlimited views in a 48-hour window, and everything above that fee goes to the film team. On a $6 rental that is a far smaller cut than any percentage platform. The account also runs ticketed screenings, both in-person and virtual, which is where Kinema is genuinely different: it treats a film as something communities gather around, not just a file behind a paywall.

The cost sits before the sale. To publish a film you take a per-film annual subscription, either $108 a year on the cheaper plan or $270 a year on the one that keeps you a larger share of ticket and license revenue. So a filmmaker with one documentary pays a fixed yearly cost regardless of how many rentals land, and the split on screenings is worse on the cheaper tier. That is the opposite of Gumroad’s pay-only-when-you-sell model, and it rewards a film that will actually sell.

The honest limit is reach. Filmmakers who have used it report that Kinema can find viewers but that its audience is small, there is no Roku or Apple TV app, and it is not a substitute for the big aggregators if you are hoping for passive discovery. Read that as the boundary of the tool: Kinema is strongest when you bring your own audience, a mailing list, a cause, host partners, festival momentum, and want to sell rentals and run screenings to them without handing 30% to a store.

If your Vimeo On Demand page was really one film or one workshop with a price on it, Gumroad is the least painful replacement to stand up. There is no monthly fee. You upload the file, set a price, and share a link, and the checkout works the same day. Gumroad takes 10% plus 50 cents on each sale made through your profile or a direct link, and nothing when you make nothing. Since January 2025 it acts as merchant of record, which means it collects and remits sales tax and VAT worldwide, so the paperwork that comes with selling to buyers in dozens of countries is off your desk.

Two limits keep it honest. First, the model is buy or download, not a timed rental: a customer purchases lifetime access to the file, and there is no rent-and-expire window like VOD offered. For selling a film outright that is fine, and it can be simpler for buyers; for a rental catalog it is the wrong shape. Second, the fee has a sting in the tail. The 10% rate is for sales you drive yourself. If a buyer finds you through Gumroad’s own Discover marketplace, the fee jumps to 30%, so treat any marketplace sales as a bonus, not the plan.

What you do not get is a film storefront. Gumroad gives you a product page and a creator profile, not a branded catalog with trailers, categories and apps. For one or two titles that is plenty and the speed is the point. For a library of dozens of films you want browsed and rented, a purpose-built store like Uscreen or Kinema will present them far better. Gumroad is the tool that gets you selling again this afternoon.

Some Vimeo On Demand sellers were never really running a video store. They were selling access to an event: a one-night premiere, a recorded workshop, a live show. For that, Dacast is a better fit than any catalog platform. It is built for live streaming first, with reliable multi-CDN delivery and DRM on the Scale plan, and its built-in paywall sells pay-per-view, rentals and one-time purchases that you embed on your own website rather than list on a marketplace. If your income spikes around dates rather than trickling from a back catalog, this is the shape that matches.

The pricing is usage-based and cuts both ways. Dacast sells a bandwidth and storage allowance from $39 a month billed annually, with no fee per subscriber, so a well-attended paid event can be cheap per viewer. But the built-in paywall takes 9.9% plus 40 cents on each purchase, and heavy on-demand viewing burns through the allowance, with overages at $0.30 per GB of data. Model your real watch hours before assuming it beats a percentage-only tool, especially if the same film gets watched many times.

The limit is that Dacast is infrastructure, not a storefront. It gives you a reliable player and a paywall, but no ready-made catalog page, no trailers, no native apps, and thin audience-marketing tools. You bring the website the paywall lives on and the traffic that fills the event. For a seller whose product is an event and who already has a site, that is exactly the right amount of tool. For someone who wanted VOD’s ready-made storefront, it is not.

Filmhub answers a different question from the rest of this list. Instead of "where do I build my store", it answers "how do I get my film onto the stores people already use". It is an aggregator: you submit a title, Filmhub handles quality control, delivery and pitching, and it places the film on channels like Amazon, Apple TV, Tubi and Roku. On the free plan its own cut is 20%, so for every dollar a channel pays Filmhub, you keep 80 cents. There is no upfront cost to try it, and the reach is the point, a link off your own site cannot put you inside the Apple TV store.

What you trade is control and visibility. This is not a storefront you own; it is placement inside other people’s stores, and the money arrives on their reporting cycles, often 60 to 90 days behind the sale. On the TVOD channels, default pricing is $9.99 to buy and $4.99 to rent, and how much control you have over that price varies by channel, Apple lets Filmhub set within tiers, Amazon can override it. Filmmakers on Reddit describe the harder edges: slow quality control, modest payouts, thin communication, and a standard deal that gives you no audit rights over the numbers you are shown.

There is also a cost floor beneath the "free". Premium quality control runs $499 a title, and faster support sits on paid Plus and Pro plans, so getting your film through the pipeline quickly is not free even if listing is. The honest way to use Filmhub is as reach that sits alongside a direct-sale option, not as a replacement for one. Sell rentals from your own Uscreen or Kinema store to the audience you own, and let Filmhub chase the buyers who only ever shop inside Amazon and Apple.

It is worth saying plainly, because the searches overlap. Vimeo On Demand and every tool above are for selling films or videos as rentals, purchases or store placements. If what you actually have is a single video sales letter on a landing page, running paid traffic to it, none of these is the right tool. A sales platform is built to take payment for a title, not to score one conversion video and prove which ad bought.

For that job the tools are different in kind. A purpose-built VSL player reports second-by-second retention, hook and hold rates, and fires watch-depth pixels to your ad account so you can prove which traffic converts. That is the whole game for direct response, and it is not something a film store does. If that is your job, start with our ranking of the best VSL players and conversion video software instead of this list.