If you have been recording quick walkthroughs with Loom for a while, there is a moment that catches almost every free user off guard: you hit "record," and instead of a recording, you get a wall asking you to upgrade. You have reached the Loom video limit — 25 videos, lifetime, on the free plan. Not 25 per month. Not 25 that reset. Twenty-five, total, ever, until you delete something or pay.
This guide breaks down exactly how Loom's free tier works in 2026, what the 25-video cap actually counts, why Atlassian's February 2026 changes made the situation worse, and — most usefully — how to record an unlimited number of videos for free without any of these restrictions. The Loom facts below are accurate as of mid-2026; the workflow recommendations point to free, browser-based tools you can start using in the next two minutes.
TL;DR
- Loom's free plan has a hard 25-video lifetime cap. Once you hit it, you cannot record or save new videos without upgrading or permanently deleting old ones.
- The 5-minute recording cap per video and the Loom branding/watermark on free-tier shared videos compound the frustration.
- Free users cannot download their own Loom videos as MP4 — native download is gated to paid Business plans and above.
- Atlassian retired the "Creator Lite" free role in February 2026, auto-billing passive viewers at roughly $18/month per seat — triggering widespread cancellations and a wave of billing complaints.
- Clipy records unlimited videos in the browser — no signup, no watermark, no 5-minute cap, no per-viewer charges — and anyone can watch your shared links without creating an account. Start at Clipy's free browser screen recorder.
What Loom's Free Plan Actually Gives You in 2026 — The Complete Breakdown
Loom's free tier (officially the "Starter" free plan) is best understood as a trial dressed up as a product. It is generous enough to get you hooked on the workflow — record, get a link, paste it into Slack — and tightly capped enough that any real, sustained use pushes you toward a paid seat. Here is the full picture of the Loom free tier restrictions in 2026, feature by feature.
| Restriction | What it means on the free plan |
|---|---|
| Video library cap | 25 videos, lifetime — not monthly, not resettable without deleting content |
| Recording length | 5 minutes maximum per video |
| Branding | Loom watermark / branding on shared videos |
| MP4 download | Not available — locked behind Business plan and above |
| Custom domains | Not available |
| Engagement analytics | Not available (no view-by-view insights, no CTAs) |
| Viewer experience | Viewers need a Loom account to comment or react |
Two of these deserve special attention because they directly contradict why most people picked Loom in the first place. The first is the watermark: free-tier videos carry Loom branding, so the polished, professional clip you wanted to send a client arrives stamped with someone else's logo. The second is the 5-minute recording cap. Async video's whole promise is "I can explain this faster by talking through it than by writing a wall of text" — and a 5-minute ceiling means any real onboarding walkthrough, bug reproduction, or design review gets chopped into awkward multi-part recordings.
There is also a quieter friction point: viewers must create a Loom account to comment. For internal async workflows, where the entire point is to remove meetings and let people respond on their own time, forcing every viewer through a signup wall to leave a single comment undercuts the model. This is exactly the friction Clipy was built to avoid — more on that below, but the short version is that with Clipy's screen recorder, anyone with the link can watch instantly, no account required.
The 25-Video Cap Explained: What Counts, What Doesn't, and What Happens When You Hit It
The Loom 25-video limit on the free plan is the single most misunderstood part of the free tier, because the word "limit" implies a refill. It does not refill. Here is precisely how it behaves.
Every saved recording counts — for good
Each recording that lands in your Loom library counts as one of your 25 slots. There is no monthly reset, no rolling window, no expiry that frees up space over time. A video you recorded eighteen months ago still occupies a slot today. The counter only moves in one direction — up — until you intervene.
Deleting frees a slot — but the content is gone
The only way to make room without paying is to permanently delete existing videos. Delete five old recordings and you can record five new ones. The catch is obvious and painful: that deleted content is gone, including any link you previously shared. If you embedded a Loom walkthrough in your product docs, a help-center article, or a closed support ticket eight months ago, deleting it to free up a slot silently breaks that embed. Before you delete anything, it is worth saving a local copy first — which, on the free plan, Loom itself will not let you do (see the download section below).
Workspace-shared videos count against the creator
A common misconception is that sharing a video into a team workspace moves it off your personal quota. It does not. The 25-video cap follows the creator of the video, not the workspace it lives in. So an active team member who records frequently will burn through their personal allotment regardless of how the videos are organized — and then be unable to record more until they upgrade or prune.
What the UI shows when you hit the cap
When you reach video number 25 and try to record number 26, Loom does not let you record and then warn you. It blocks the recording up front with an upgrade prompt — an "upgrade to keep recording" wall. There is no grace recording, no "just this once." The product is designed so that the moment you have integrated Loom deeply enough into your workflow to hit 25 videos is the exact moment it asks for your card.
Why the number is 25
This is not an accident or a technical constraint — storage is cheap. The 25-video cap is a monetisation funnel. Free tiers in this category serve one of two purposes: a permanent free product that earns goodwill and upsells a minority, or a trial that converts. Loom's free tier is built as the latter. Twenty-five videos is enough to prove the workflow's value and create switching cost, and small enough that any team using video communication seriously will cross it within a few weeks. The cap is the conversion mechanism, not a side effect.
The Atlassian Factor: What Changed in February 2026 and Why Users Are Leaving
The 25-video cap has existed for a long time. What turned a manageable annoyance into a mass exodus was a pricing and access change layered on top of it. Understanding the Loom Creator Lite retirement in 2026 explains why so many teams are re-evaluating right now.
The acquisition
Atlassian acquired Loom in 2023 for roughly $975 million. Acquisitions of free-tier-heavy products almost always lead to the same thing eventually: a re-examination of who is using the product for free and how that free usage can be converted to revenue. Loom was no exception.
February 2026: Creator Lite retired
Around February 1, 2026, Atlassian retired Loom's "Creator Lite" role. Creator Lite had effectively let passive participants — people who mostly watched, reacted, or occasionally commented rather than recording — exist inside a workspace without occupying a paid seat. When that role was removed, those passive viewers were folded into the billable seat structure, at roughly $18 per month per seat.
The bill-shock pattern
For a solo user, this was an annoyance. For teams, it was a financial shock. Consider a company where a handful of people recorded videos but a hundred colleagues occasionally watched them. Under Creator Lite, those hundred viewers cost nothing. After the change, a workspace that was paying a modest amount could suddenly face a bill in the five figures annually — the widely shared "$240 to $24,000" pattern — because every passive viewer became a seat. The increase often arrived with little practical warning that scaled to the dollar amount, which is precisely what turns a routine price change into a trust-destroying event.
The Trustpilot fallout
The reaction shows up in the reviews. Loom's Trustpilot score sits around 1.4 out of 5, and the bulk of the recent negative reviews are not about product quality — they are about surprise billing, difficulty cancelling, and being charged for users the reviewer did not consider active. When a product's public rating collapses to billing complaints, the underlying product can still be excellent; the relationship is what broke.
The double-friction event
Here is the part that ties this section back to the cap: many users discovered the 25-video limit at the same moment they were asked to pay more. They went to record, hit the library wall, looked at the upgrade price in light of the new seat-based billing, and decided the math no longer worked. Two separate frictions — a content cap and a pricing change — arrived together, and that combination is what pushed people to actively search for alternatives rather than just grumble. If that is you, the comparison at Clipy's Loom alternative page lays out the differences without the marketing gloss.
The Download Wall: Why Free Loom Users Can't Save Their Own Recordings
Of all the free-tier restrictions, this is the one people find hardest to accept: on the free plan, you cannot download your own video. The Loom video download limit for free users is absolute — native MP4 export is a paid feature.
MP4 download is a Business-plan feature
Downloading a Loom recording as an MP4 file requires a Business plan or higher. Free and downgraded accounts see a download button that is locked or simply absent. The recording exists, it plays back in your browser, it is "yours" — but you cannot pull a copy off Loom's servers onto your own machine without paying.
The downgrade trap
This becomes especially sharp after a downgrade. If your account drops from a paid tier back to free — say, because a team stopped paying after the Creator Lite change — videos you could previously download may become inaccessible to download again. The content is held on the platform, gated behind the plan you no longer have. That is the moment people realize that "your videos" on a free SaaS plan are only yours as long as you keep paying.
The workaround for shared videos
If a Loom video has been shared with a public link, you can save an MP4 copy of it without any Loom account and without paying. Clipy offers a free Loom video downloader that takes a shared Loom link and returns a clean MP4 file — no signup, no watermark added, no upload of your own. This is the fastest way to rescue videos you are about to lose to a cap or a downgrade, and we cover the full migration approach in the section on your existing library below.
How to Record Unlimited Videos for Free — The Clipy Way
This is the part that matters most: how to record unlimited videos for free without Loom. The answer is to use a tool whose business model does not depend on rationing your recordings. Clipy is a free, browser-based screen recorder, and it removes every restriction described above.
- No install, no signup, no account, no cap. Clipy records directly in the browser. You open the page and record. There is no library limit because there is no monetisation funnel built around rationing your videos.
- No watermark at any tier. Free Clipy recordings carry no Clipy branding. The clip you send your client or teammate looks like your work, because it is.
- No 5-minute cap. Record a 45-minute onboarding walkthrough or a full design review in one take, without splitting it into parts or racing a timer.
- Instant shareable link — and no viewer signup wall. When you stop recording, you get a link. Anyone can open it and watch immediately. They do not need a Clipy account, they do not get asked to sign up to leave a reaction, and they are never billed as a "seat." This no-signup-to-watch experience is the single biggest practical difference from Loom.
- Camera, screen, and mic together. Capture your screen with a webcam bubble and your microphone simultaneously — the standard async-video setup. See the full capability set at Clipy's screen recorder.
- A Chrome extension if you prefer a persistent toolbar. If you record often and want a one-click button in your browser chrome rather than opening a page each time, the Clipy Chrome screen recorder extension gives you exactly that.
The point is not that Clipy has more features than Loom's enterprise tiers — it does not, and we will be honest about that in the FAQ. The point is that for the core job most people hired Loom to do, the restrictions are the product's defining feature, and Clipy simply does not have them.
Step-by-Step: Replace Loom With Clipy Without Losing Your Workflow
If you want to record more than 25 videos for free starting today, here is the full switch, step by step. The whole loop — open, record, share — is fast enough that we built a dedicated page demonstrating it.
Step 1: Open the recorder
Go to clipy.online/screen-recorder. There is nothing to download and no account to create. The recorder loads in the browser tab you are already in.
Step 2: Choose what to capture
Pick your source — a single browser tab, an application window, your full screen, or your webcam — and decide whether you want a webcam bubble overlaid on the screen capture. Before your first real recording, it is worth a quick check: test your mic and camera first so you do not record five minutes of perfect screen capture with a dead microphone.
Step 3: Record, stop, get your link
Hit record, do your walkthrough, and stop. You get a shareable link right away — the entire flow from opening the recorder to having a link takes about half a minute, which is the whole idea behind Clipy's 30-second watch flow. No upload progress bar to babysit, no processing queue, no "we'll email you when it's ready."
Step 4: Send the link
Paste the link into Slack, an email, a Jira ticket, a Notion doc — anywhere. Recipients click and watch instantly. No signup, no app, no "create a free account to view this." This is where the async workflow finally works the way it was supposed to: the friction is zero on the viewer's side.
A note for developers
If you embed recordings in documentation, pull requests, or issue trackers, the no-account-to-view behavior matters even more — a reviewer or teammate should never hit a login wall to see your bug repro. Clipy's recordings are built to drop cleanly into those workflows; see Clipy for developers for how teams wire it into their docs and trackers.
What About Your Existing Library? How to Rescue Videos Before You Hit the Wall
Switching recorders is easy. The harder question is what happens to the videos already sitting in your Loom library — especially the ones embedded in docs, sent to clients, or attached to support tickets. If you are near the 25-video cap, or your team is dropping to the free plan after the Creator Lite change, the videos you cannot download are the ones most at risk. Here is how to think about the migration without losing anything that matters.
Audit what you actually need to keep
Not all 25 videos are worth rescuing. Open your library and sort by what is still in use: a recording embedded in a live help-center article matters; a one-off "hey, quick question" clip from a year ago probably does not. Make a short list of the videos that are still doing a job somewhere — in documentation, in a published page, in an active deal thread — because those are the links that break the moment a video is deleted or locked behind a plan you no longer have.
Save the keepers as MP4 before they are gone
For any shared Loom video you want to keep, save a local MP4 copy while you still can. You do not need a paid Loom plan and you do not need to keep the account active — Clipy's free Loom downloader takes a shared Loom link and hands back a clean MP4, with no signup and no added watermark. Once you have the file on your own machine, the video is genuinely yours: you can re-host it, re-embed it, or hand it to a client without the platform sitting in the middle.
Repurpose, don't just archive
Once a recording is a file rather than a hosted link, your options open up. A short product demo can become a looping GIF for a landing page or README; a talking-head explainer where the visuals don't matter can be stripped to an MP3 you drop into a podcast feed or a Notion audio block. All of those conversions run client-side and free — there is no re-upload to a third party. The point is that a downloaded MP4 is portable in a way a Loom link never was.
Re-record new work in Clipy from day one
For everything going forward, there is nothing to migrate — you simply record in Clipy's browser recorder instead. New walkthroughs never touch the 25-video counter because there is no counter. The cleanest migration is the one where the only thing you move is the handful of videos still earning their keep, and everything new is born outside the cap.
Clipy vs. Loom: An Honest Comparison
No tool wins on every axis, and pretending otherwise is how marketing pages lose trust. Here is where each one genuinely leads.
| Loom (free) | Clipy (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| Videos you can record | 25, lifetime | Unlimited |
| Max length per video | 5 minutes | No fixed cap |
| Watermark on shared videos | Yes (Loom branding) | None |
| Download your own video | No (Business+ only) | Yes |
| Signup to record | Required | Not required |
| Signup to watch a shared link | Account needed to comment/react | Never — anyone watches instantly |
| Passive-viewer billing | Seat-based after Creator Lite retirement | None |
| Deep team admin, SSO, advanced analytics | Mature, on paid tiers | Not the focus |
To be fair to Loom: if you are a large organisation that wants centralised seat management, SSO, granular permissions, and an analytics dashboard with per-viewer engagement and call-to-action overlays, Loom's paid tiers are a mature product built for exactly that, and Clipy is not trying to be that. Clipy is built for the much more common case — a person or small team who wants to record a screen, get a link, and have the recipient watch it without friction or surprise bills. For that job, the free-tier caps that define Loom simply aren't there.
If you want the longer side-by-side, including the specific scenarios where each tool makes sense, the dedicated Loom alternatives comparison goes deeper than this section can.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Loom's 25-video limit reset every month?
No. The 25-video cap is a lifetime limit on the free plan, not a monthly allowance. It does not reset, roll over, or expire. The only way to free up a slot without upgrading is to permanently delete an existing video, which also breaks any link or embed pointing at it.
Do videos other people share with me count toward my 25?
The cap follows the creator of a video, not the viewer. Watching someone else's Loom does not consume your slots. But every video you record and save counts against your own 25, regardless of which workspace it lives in.
Can I download my Loom videos on the free plan?
Not natively — MP4 download is gated to Loom's Business plan and above. Free and downgraded accounts cannot export their own recordings from inside Loom. For videos that have a public share link, you can still get an MP4 using Clipy's free Loom downloader without a Loom account.
Is Clipy really free, or is "unlimited" a trial?
Clipy's browser recorder is free to use, with no 25-video cap, no 5-minute limit, and no watermark. The viewer experience is free too — anyone can open a shared link and watch without an account. There is no "Creator Lite"-style role waiting to be retired into seat billing, because Clipy does not bill per passive viewer at all.
Do my viewers need to sign up to watch a Clipy link?
No. This is the single biggest practical difference from Loom. Recipients click your link and the video plays — no account, no "sign up to view," no seat. You can confirm how fast that is on the watch-in-30-seconds page.
Is there a desktop app, or is it browser-only?
The browser recorder needs nothing installed, but if you want a native app there is Clipy for Mac and Clipy for Windows. Both record the same way and share the same no-watermark, no-signup-to-watch model.
The Bottom Line
Loom's 25-video lifetime cap is not a bug or an oversight — it is the conversion mechanism at the heart of the free plan, and it was working as designed long before Atlassian touched anything. What changed in 2026 is the cost of staying: the Creator Lite retirement turned passive viewers into billable seats, the bill-shock stories piled up, and the 1.4 Trustpilot rating reflects a relationship that broke over money, not over product quality.
If the cap is the moment you started looking for a way out, the practical move is straightforward. Rescue the handful of Loom videos still doing real work using the free Loom downloader, and record everything new — unlimited, watermark-free, with no viewer signup wall — in Clipy's browser screen recorder. The whole point of async video was to remove friction. A 25-video ceiling and a surprise seat charge are friction. Recording your twenty-sixth video for free, in the browser, in under a minute, is what it was supposed to feel like all along.