TL;DR

  • Atlassian-owned Loom retired the old Creator Lite role and tightened its free tier; the free Starter plan now caps you at 25 videos (5 minutes each) per Loom's pricing page.
  • Existing free-plan users have been migrated, and many small teams are seeing larger invoices when they hit the new limits or get nudged onto Business at $15/creator/month.
  • Loom deletion is permanent and immediate — there is no trash bin and no recovery window, per Atlassian's own docs — so never delete or cancel before you have your own copies.
  • The minimum safe migration is: audit, export what matters, pick a free replacement, re-host, swap share links, verify everything works, then cancel.
  • You can download your old Looms directly with a no-signup tool — the rest is logistics.
  • This post is the seven-step checklist we recommend to anyone walking out the door this month.

Step 0: Why right now?

Loom was acquired by Atlassian in late 2023. Through 2024 and 2025, Atlassian folded Loom's pricing and plans into its broader catalog and retired the old Creator Lite role. According to Loom's pricing page at loom.com/pricing, the current free tier is called "Starter" and caps you at 25 videos with a 5-minute per-video limit. The paid Business plan starts at $15 per creator per month (billed annually) at the time of writing.

If you were on an older free plan with a larger video allowance, you have either already been migrated to the current limits or you will be. Several teams have written that their effective bill jumped when they added a few extra creator seats to stay above the new limits. We are not going to pretend every team is seeing a 10x jump — that depends entirely on how many seats you had and which legacy plan you were on — but the direction of travel is clear and documented in Atlassian's own announcements at support.atlassian.com/loom/.

The practical reading: if Loom is now meaningfully more expensive for what you actually use it for, this is the right month to evaluate alternatives. You do not have to delete anything to leave — you can simply stop using Loom and let the plan lapse — so there is no need for rushed deletions. Just know the flip side before you cancel: Loom deletion is permanent, with no trash bin and no recovery (per Atlassian's help docs), so your own exported copies are the only safety net. For a fuller breakdown of what Atlassian changed in Loom's pricing, we have a separate piece. This post is the operational checklist.

Step 1: Audit your current Loom usage

Before you move anything, you need an honest count of what is actually in your Loom workspace and what still earns its keep. Open Loom in your browser, sign in, and go to your Library (the folder icon in the left sidebar). At the top of the Library you will see a recording counter — note that number. Then walk the folders top to bottom.

For each recording, you only need to answer one question: "If this disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?" In our experience auditing a year-old Loom workspace, somewhere between 60% and 80% of the recordings answer "no." They were one-off bug reports, internal walkthroughs that have since been written up, or sales demos for deals that closed (or didn't) months ago. Those do not need to migrate; you can leave them on Loom and simply stop using the account — just do not rely on cancellation as a deletion workflow, because Loom does not automatically purge your library when you cancel.

The ones that answer "yes" — usually customer-facing tutorials, onboarding videos, signed-off design walkthroughs, public help-doc embeds — are the ones you have to physically move. Tag them in Loom with a folder called "keep" so you have a single place to work from in Step 2.

Also pull a list of where these recordings are linked from. Notion pages, Slack pinned messages, Intercom help docs, your support knowledge base, your sales follow-up templates — any place a Loom URL lives. You will need this list in Step 5 when you swap share links.

Roughly: spend an hour on Step 1. If you spend two hours, you are over-auditing. If you spend ten minutes, you will find out the hard way which recording was the one your team actually depended on.

Step 2: Download the recordings you want to keep

Here is the catch most migration guides miss: Loom's native download (the three-dot menu → Download) is only available on the Business, Business+, and Enterprise plans. Per Atlassian's own download docs, admins and creators on a Starter Free plan cannot download videos, and the Creator Lite and Viewer roles cannot download on any plan. So if you are on Loom's free plan — which is most people reading this — Loom gives you no native way to get your own recordings out, which is exactly why a browser-based downloader matters. We built the Clipy Loom downloader specifically for this — paste a public Loom share URL and our backend fetches the source, packages it as a real MP4, and delivers it to you through CDN. No signup, no watermark, no Loom subscription. Files are auto-deleted within 24 hours, and the tool only works on public Loom share links — private or password-protected Looms are not supported, because we deliberately do not bypass Loom's authentication.

The flow: open your "keep" folder in Loom, right-click each video's share link, paste it into the tool, hit download. Save them to a local folder organized however you like — we suggest folder-per-month so they sort cleanly later. The MP4s come out at whatever resolution Loom stored them at, so quality is preserved.

If you have dozens of videos to pull, the fastest path is the bulk Loom migration tool — paste up to 20 public Loom share links at once and each one lands in your Clipy library as a playable video, so you can move a small library without babysitting each URL. (If you have been looking for a browser add-on, see why our web-based downloader is a safer alternative than the sketchy Loom-download extensions.) The single-link downloader is free and does not require an account. Bulk migration into your Clipy library is also free, but requires signing in with Google so Clipy knows which library to save the videos into. Either way, it works on public Loom share links — private or password-protected videos need to be made shareable first.

While you are here, also download your old Looms that you are not sure about. Disk space is cheap; regret is not. A 100-recording Loom workspace is usually under 10 GB on disk once exported.

Verify a couple of the downloads actually play locally before moving on. Open two or three in QuickTime / VLC / your default player. Confirm audio and video. If anything looks off, re-download those — we have seen sporadic Loom CDN hiccups in 2026 that produce truncated MP4s on the first try.

Step 3: Pick a free replacement that doesn't require migration friction

The right replacement is one your team can switch to in an afternoon, not a quarter. That means: works in the browser (no IT-approved installer), no per-seat signup, no "request a demo," and ideally no account required for the people who watch the videos.

There are a few categories. Tella and Vidyard are solid SaaS competitors but they reintroduce the same per-seat pricing model you are trying to leave. OBS is genuinely free and powerful but has a real learning curve, and most of your team will not install it. The browser-based options — Clipy, Vmaker's free tier, Screencastify's free tier — are the easiest swap because they require nothing from the people watching.

We obviously have a horse in this race: we built Clipy as a free Loom alternative with no signup, no watermark, no recording cap, and unlimited free hosting. We are not going to spend this section pitching it; the link covers our claims and you can verify them in 30 seconds.

What you should actually evaluate, regardless of which tool you pick: (1) does it record screen + camera + mic without a desktop install, (2) does it produce a share link without forcing the viewer to sign up, (3) does it let you download the MP4 source for archiving, and (4) is the free tier actually free or is it a 14-day trial with credit card required. If a tool fails (1) or (2), it will not stick — your team will go back to Loom muscle memory within a week.

Pick one. Move on. You can always switch again in six months; the cost of "the wrong replacement" is much lower than the cost of staying on a tool you have already decided to leave.

Step 4: Re-host the recordings you actually need

You have your downloaded MP4s from Step 2 and your new tool from Step 3. Now you have to decide, per recording, whether to re-host the existing video or just re-record it.

Our rule of thumb: if the video is under five minutes and you are still the same person doing the work, re-record. It is genuinely faster than uploading the old MP4, getting a new share link, and updating all the surfaces. A 3-minute "how to file an expense report" recording takes about 4 minutes to redo end-to-end with the free screen recorder we built, and you get to fix whatever was awkward about the original.

If the video is over ten minutes, was a one-time event (a customer demo, a signed-off design review, a recorded standup), or features people who no longer work with you, re-host instead. Most modern recorders accept an MP4 upload and give you a hosted share URL. With Clipy specifically, you can drag the MP4 into the upload flow and get a sharable link in under a minute — no transcoding wait for files under about a gig.

One thing to handle deliberately: chapters, captions, and view counters do not migrate. If your old Loom had AI-generated chapters or captions, the new host will need to regenerate them. Captions usually regenerate automatically on upload; chapters depend on the tool. View counters always reset to zero, which is fine — the videos that matter for engagement signaling are usually the ones you should re-record anyway.

Keep your local MP4 archive even after re-hosting. It is your insurance policy against the next platform also changing its pricing.

This is the unglamorous step that determines whether the migration actually works. If the Loom links in your help center, Slack pins, sales templates, and Notion pages still point at loom.com when you cancel, you will get a flood of "this video isn't loading" messages two months from now.

Work from the list you made in Step 1. For each surface, find-and-replace the old Loom URL with the new share URL. Specifically:

  • Notion / Confluence / Coda: use the workspace-wide search for "loom.com" and walk each result. Most of these tools let you edit the underlying embed block; replace the URL and the new player should render inline.
  • Slack: Slack does not let you edit messages older than your retention window in most workspaces, so for pinned messages you usually have to re-pin a fresh message with the new URL and unpin the old one. Search "loom.com" in your top channels and update the live ones.
  • Help center / Intercom / Zendesk: these have a global search across articles. Find-and-replace the URLs and re-publish. Double-check the rendered article — some help centers cache embeds aggressively and need a manual republish to refresh.
  • Email templates and sales sequences: these live in your CRM or sequencing tool. Update the template, not the sent emails.
  • Public documentation / your website: highest priority. A broken video on your marketing site is more expensive than a broken video in an internal Notion page.

Leave the old Loom URLs live during this step. Do not delete or unshare anything from Loom yet — that comes in Step 7. The goal of Step 5 is just to make sure the new links work everywhere before anything is irreversibly removed.

Budget a half day for this if you have a typical small-team footprint, a full day if you have a mature help center.

Step 6: Verify everything before you cancel Loom

This is the most important step and the easiest to skip — and the one most “switch off Loom” guides get wrong. There is no trash bin and no 30-day recovery window on Loom: per Atlassian's own docs, once a video is deleted all of its data is purged from the system and cannot be recovered. What you do get is your current billing period — if you cancel a paid plan you keep full access until the period ends, then drop to the free Starter plan, where you keep access to all your existing videos (Atlassian's docs confirm you keep them even over the 25-video cap) but cannot record new ones until you delete enough to get back under it. So the safe move is to keep Loom live and untouched until you have verified the migration, not to lean on a recovery window that does not exist.

That billing-period access is your safety net. You use it like this: complete Steps 1 through 5, but leave your Loom subscription running and do not delete anything. For the next few weeks, every time you find a broken link in a corner of your stack you forgot about, you can still pull the original from Loom. Every time a teammate asks "hey what happened to that recording from the all-hands?", you can still grab it — as long as the source has not been deleted and its share/access settings still allow you to view it.

During this verification window, also keep an eye on the few measurable failure modes: (1) views on the new host — are people actually watching the migrated videos, or did the embed silently break on some surface? (2) Inbound messages or tickets that reference videos — are people asking about ones you do not have? (3) Search analytics — did any blog post or help article drop in traffic because its embedded video stopped rendering?

If everything looks clean after a couple of weeks of real-world use, you are done. If you find a gap, you still have your Loom access and your local MP4 copies from Step 2 to fix it without scrambling. This single step is what turns "we tried switching off Loom and it was a mess" into "we switched off Loom and nothing broke."

Set a calendar reminder for the end of your billing period. Otherwise you will forget about the open Loom subscription for three months and be annoyed when you spot it on your next invoice.

Step 7: Cancel Loom — and what to expect in the flow

When you have verified the migration and your billing period is winding down, cancel. The path: sign in to Loom, click your avatar in the top-right, go to Settings, then Plans & Billing. From there, find the "Cancel plan" or "Downgrade" option. If you only have the free Starter plan, there is technically nothing to cancel — you can leave the workspace as-is, or delete the workspace entirely from the workspace settings page.

For paid plans, expect three things in the cancellation flow. First, Atlassian will offer a retention discount — usually a percentage off the next renewal. If the discount makes the math work for you and you have not actually migrated yet, that is fine; otherwise decline. Second, you will be asked the reason for cancelling; you can pick whatever feels accurate, but in our experience "switched to a different tool" produces the cleanest downstream confirmation email. Third, the cancellation does not take effect immediately — you keep paid access until the end of your current billing period. The videos themselves stay viewable until the end of that period; after that you drop to the free Starter plan, where Atlassian says you keep access to all your existing videos — you just cannot record new ones until you are back under the 25-video cap.

One detail worth knowing: cancellation does not automatically delete your recordings. They remain viewable even if you are over the Starter cap, but you cannot create new recordings until you upgrade or get back under the cap. If you want them gone, you can delete them explicitly — but remember Loom deletion is permanent and immediate, with no trash bin or recovery, so only delete videos you have already exported. Most teams do not bother; they simply stop using the workspace.

Save the cancellation confirmation email. Forward it to your finance person so they know not to expect another Loom charge. Done.

FAQ

Will my Loom share links still work after I cancel? Yes, as long as the videos still exist and their sharing settings still allow viewing. After your paid billing period ends, you drop to Starter; Atlassian says you keep access to existing videos even over the 25-video cap, but cannot record new ones until you upgrade or delete enough videos. Deleted videos are permanently purged with no trash window. This is exactly why Step 5 (update share links) and Step 2 (keep your own MP4 copies) matter.

Can I keep my recordings if I downgrade to the free Starter plan? Yes. Per Atlassian's downgrade docs, even if you are over the 25-video free-tier cap you keep access to all your existing videos — the only restriction is that you cannot record new ones until you upgrade or delete enough to get back under 25. So your old recordings stay viewable; the reason to pull MP4 copies is portability and insurance, not a fear that downgrading hides them.

Do I have to tell Atlassian why I am leaving? No. The cancellation flow asks, but you can skip it or pick any option. It does not change the outcome.

What if I cancel and then change my mind? You keep access until the end of your billing period; after that you are on the free Starter plan, where Atlassian says you keep access to all your existing videos (you just cannot record new ones past the 25 cap). There is no trash window — once a video is actually deleted it is permanently purged with no recovery — so your exported MP4 copies are the only reliable undo.

Does the Clipy Loom downloader work on private Loom videos? No. Clipy's downloader only works with public Loom share links. Private, workspace-only, and password-protected Loom videos rely on Loom authentication, and Clipy deliberately does not bypass that. Make the video publicly shareable first, or export it through Loom if your plan and role allow downloads.

If you only do one thing this week, do Step 2. Pull copies of the recordings you actually care about, so the rest of this checklist becomes a logistical exercise instead of a deadline. The Clipy Loom downloader takes a public Loom share URL and hands you back a real MP4 — no signup, no Loom subscription. The conversion runs on our servers and the file is delivered via CDN, then auto-deleted within 24 hours. Once your videos are safely on your own disk, the other six steps — pick a replacement, re-host, swap links, verify, cancel — are just work you can do at your own pace. The Loom-refugee window is open; you do not have to rush, but you also do not have to wait.