TL;DR

  • Downgrading Loom or going over the free-plan limit does not delete your existing videos — Loom's own docs say that if your video count exceeds 25, "you will still have access to all your videos."
  • What you lose is the ability to make new ones: on the free Starter plan, once you have 25 videos you can't record again until you upgrade or delete down below 25, and new screen recordings are capped at 5 minutes.
  • The catch most people miss: on the free Starter plan you can't download your own recordings at all — native MP4 export is a paid (Business and above) feature, per Loom's download docs. Your videos are viewable but stuck on Loom's servers.
  • The only way to free up a slot is to delete a video — and Loom states deletion is permanent and unrecoverable, with no trash bin and no recovery window.
  • So the real risk isn't "my videos vanished." It's "I can't get them out, I can't record more, and the one move that frees up space destroys an original for good."
  • The fix is the same in every case: pull MP4 copies of the recordings you care about before you're boxed in, using a tool that works while your account still has access — like the Clipy Loom downloader (free, no signup).
  • This is the companion to our calm switch-off-Loom checklist and our deeper 25-video-limit explainer — this one answers the exact question people search: "wait, what actually happens to my videos?"

The short version: your videos stay, but you get boxed in

Here's the reassuring part first, because it's the thing most people are anxious about. Downgrading your Loom plan or crossing the free-plan video limit does not immediately delete your recordings. Atlassian's own help docs are explicit: in the page on downgrading or cancelling your Loom plan, Loom states that "if your video count exceeds 25 you will still have access to all your videos." They are not hidden, not archived against your will, not deleted on the spot.

Here's the part that's less obvious and matters more. "You still have access" means you can watch them. It does not mean you can do the three things you'd actually want to do with your own work: record more, get copies out, or reorganize freely. On the free Starter plan, all three of those are constrained at once. The honest summary isn't "Loom deleted my videos" — it's "Loom kept my videos but boxed me in around them."

That gap between "I can see them" and "they're actually mine to use" is the whole subject of this article. The good news is that the way out is simple and free, and it's the same in every scenario: get local MP4 copies of the recordings you care about before the box closes. Once a video is a plain file on a disk you control, no plan change, pricing update, or per-seat billing model can touch it. The rest of this post walks through exactly what the free plan does and does not let you do — straight from Loom's documentation — so you can decide which videos to pull and how much room you actually have.

What the free Starter plan actually limits in 2026

Loom was acquired by Atlassian in late 2023, and through 2024–2026 Atlassian folded Loom's plans into its broader catalog. The current free tier is the Starter plan, and per Atlassian's storage-limit documentation it has two hard caps that shape everything below:

  • A 25-video lifetime limit. Not 25 per month, not 25 that reset — 25 total on the account. A clip you recorded eighteen months ago still occupies one of those slots today.
  • A 5-minute limit per screen recording. New screen recordings on the free plan are capped at five minutes.

Free Starter videos also carry Loom branding. The paid Business plan removes the caps and the branding; it's a paid plan, and you can see current per-user pricing on Loom's pricing page (we're deliberately not quoting a single dollar figure here because Loom adjusts it and shows different monthly vs. annual rates). For the full breakdown of how the cap behaves — what counts toward it, what doesn't, and the billing changes that made it newly painful for teams — we keep a dedicated 25-video-limit explainer. This post focuses on the one question that explainer doesn't center: what happens to the videos you already have.

What actually happens when you downgrade or hit the limit

Let's be precise, because this is where rumor and reality diverge.

When you downgrade from a paid Loom plan to the free Starter plan — or you simply cross the 25-video line — here's what Loom's downgrade documentation says happens:

  • You keep access to all your existing videos. Verbatim: "if your video count exceeds 25 you will still have access to all your videos." Your share links keep working, your embeds keep playing, your library is intact.
  • You can't record new videos until you're back under the cap. Verbatim: "you will not be able to create a new recording until you upgrade your Loom plan or delete videos to move under 25 videos."
  • New screen recordings, when you can make them, are limited to 5 minutes.

So the immediate effect of a downgrade is not loss — it's a freeze. Your back catalog is fine. Your future is what gets capped: you've hit a wall on recording, and the only two ways through it are paying again or deleting something. That's a meaningfully different problem than "my videos disappeared," and it's worth understanding clearly, because the two real traps live in the next two sections.

The catch nobody mentions: you can't download your own videos on the free plan

This is the constraint that turns a manageable freeze into a genuine lock-in, and it's the one people discover at the worst possible moment.

On the free Starter plan, you cannot download your own recordings from Loom at all. Atlassian's download documentation is direct about it: "Admins/creators on a Starter Free plan cannot download videos." Native MP4 export is available only on paid plans — Business, Business+, and Enterprise — and only for certain roles (Creator Lite and Viewer roles don't get download on any plan).

Sit with what that means in combination with the previous section. You keep access to watch your videos on the free plan, but Loom gives you no button to pull a copy off its servers. Your recordings are visible and simultaneously trapped — you can press play, you just can't take them with you. So the natural instinct after a downgrade — "fine, I'll just download my important videos and keep them" — runs straight into a wall, because downloading is the exact feature the free plan removes.

And here's the timing trap that catches people: if you downgrade first and try to rescue your library second, you're now on the plan that can't download. The safe order is the reverse — get your copies out while you still have a path to them, then downgrade. Which is exactly why a third-party downloader that works on a normal share link, with no plan requirement, is the practical answer. Paste a Loom share URL into the Clipy Loom downloader and it returns an MP4 copy — no watermark, no account, no upgrade. (It works on public Loom share links and doesn't bypass private or password-protected videos.) If you have a lot to pull, the Loom downloader Chrome extension adds a download button to every Loom page so you can walk your library without copy-pasting. And to move a whole set at once, our Loom migration tool takes up to 20 share links per run and lands each one in your Clipy library as a playable video under a link you control.

The only way to free a slot is to delete — and deletion is permanent

Once you're at 25 videos and you want to record again without paying, Loom gives you exactly one free lever: delete something. And that lever is sharper than it looks.

Per Atlassian's permanent-deletion documentation, deleting a Loom video is irreversible: it's "the irreversible removal of video data from Loom's servers," after which "the video can no longer be accessed, even with the original link." The same docs are blunt that "Loom Support can't recover deleted videos." There is no trash bin, no recycle folder, no 30-day grace window for a deleted recording — once it's gone, it's gone, and so is its share link and every embed pointing at it.

Loom does offer an archive feature as the safer alternative — archiving moves a video out of your active view without destroying it — but archiving doesn't help you get the file out, and deleting an archived video is just as permanent. So the free-plan endgame, if you keep recording, looks like this: you hit 25, you need room, your only free option is to permanently destroy an older recording, and you can't first download the one you're about to delete. That's the moment a lot of teams realize their "safe" Loom library was never really portable.

The takeaway is not to panic-delete or to rush. It's the opposite: because deletion is final and downloading is paywalled, the calm move is to pull MP4 copies of anything you'd miss before you're forced to choose between paying and destroying. Local copies turn an irreversible decision into a reversible one.

Share links are where this quietly becomes a problem on other people's screens, so it's worth being exact about when they break and when they don't.

A downgrade by itself does not delete your videos, so your share links and embeds should keep working — unless a video is archived or marked inactive, made private, or deleted. In other words, simply dropping to the free plan doesn't break your Notion embeds, Slack pins, or help-center tutorials on its own.

What breaks them is deletion — and deletion is the one free move the cap pushes you toward. The moment you delete a video to free up a slot, every place that link lives goes dark at once, with no redirect and no warning:

  • Notion / Confluence / Coda embeds render a broken player.
  • Slack pins and DMs stop unfurling into a playable preview.
  • Help-center and knowledge-base articles show an "unavailable" box where the walkthrough used to be.
  • Public marketing or docs pages — the most expensive case — show a dead video to prospects and customers.

Because the link dies the instant the video is deleted, and deletion can't be undone, the order of operations matters enormously. If you ever plan to clear out old recordings to keep using the free plan, download and (where needed) re-host the ones that are still embedded somewhere first, swap those links to a destination you control, and only then delete from Loom. Our switch-off-Loom checklist has the full link-swap playbook; the headline is: never let an old link die before the new one is live.

The move that makes all of this a non-issue

Strip away the details and every scenario in this article collapses to one decision: do you have your own copies of the videos that matter, or do they live only inside Loom?

If you have local copies, none of Loom's plan mechanics can hurt you. Downgrade whenever you want. Sit at the 25-video cap. Cancel entirely. The recordings you care about are MP4s on your own disk — playable forever, re-uploadable anywhere. The plan change becomes a billing decision instead of a content problem.

If you don't, you're permanently one cap, one downgrade, or one cleanup away from a recording you can't recreate: the customer tutorial, the signed-off design review, the all-hands nobody else captured.

So the recommended sequence, in order, is:

  1. Audit — open your Loom library and flag the recordings you'd genuinely miss. For most teams that's a minority of the library; the rest are one-off bug clips and stale demos you can let go.
  2. Download the keepers now — while your account still has a path to them, run the flagged share links through the Clipy Loom downloader (or the Chrome extension for volume). Save them folder-per-month and confirm a few play locally.
  3. Re-host what's still embedded — for videos that are live somewhere, get them back online under a link you control. The migration tool does this in batches of 20; for short clips it's often faster to just re-record fresh.
  4. Swap the links — update Notion, Slack, help docs, and marketing pages while the old Loom links are still alive.
  5. Then downgrade, cap out, or cancel — and if you delete anything in Loom afterward, you already have the copies.

Do step 2 even if you do nothing else this week. Local copies are cheap insurance, and they're the one thing that makes every later decision reversible, in a system where Loom's own decisions (deletion, download gating) are not.

Re-record vs re-host: a quick rule of thumb

When you get to re-hosting, you don't have to move every old MP4. A fast rule: if a video is under five minutes and you're still the person who'd record it, just re-record it fresh — it's usually faster than uploading the old file and updating every link, and you get to fix whatever was awkward the first time. A short walkthrough takes only a few minutes to redo end-to-end with Clipy's free screen recorder, which has no time limit and no watermark. If a video is longer, was a one-time event, or features people who've since moved on, re-host the downloaded MP4 instead. Either way, keep your local archive afterward — it's your insurance against the next platform changing its rules too.

Why this keeps happening — and how to not be here again

It's worth naming the pattern, because it isn't unique to Loom. When your videos live entirely inside someone else's platform, your ability to use your own work — to export it, to keep recording, to keep old links alive — is a set of toggles the vendor controls, not you. The recordings feel like yours, because they're your face and your explanations, but the switches that make them portable belong to the platform's pricing strategy. That's why a plan change can feel less like a billing event and more like a quiet narrowing of what you're allowed to do with your own content.

The durable fix isn't "find a cheaper vendor and rebuild the same dependency." It's to keep your source files where you control them and treat any hosting platform as replaceable. That's the principle behind how we built Clipy: free hosting with no viewer signup wall, downloadable MP4 sources so your videos are never trapped, and a written Clipy Pledge that we won't paywall or rug-pull the core record-and-share workflow the way teams just experienced with Loom. The pledge is dated and specific, which is the point — you can hold us to it.

If you want the calm, sequenced version of leaving, the switch-off-Loom checklist walks the full migration in seven steps. If you want to compare where to land, the best Loom alternatives in 2026 guide covers the no-signup, no-watermark options in order, and our Loom alternative page is the short version.

FAQ

If I downgrade to the free plan, do I lose my videos? No. Loom's downgrade docs state that if your video count exceeds 25, you still have access to all your videos — they're not deleted or hidden. What changes is that you can't record new videos until you upgrade or delete down below 25, and new screen recordings are capped at 5 minutes.

Can I download my Loom videos on the free plan? Not natively. Loom's download docs say admins/creators on a Starter Free plan cannot download videos — MP4 export is a paid (Business and above) feature. To get copies of your recordings off the free plan, you need a third-party downloader; the Clipy Loom downloader works on a normal share link with no signup.

Is there a trash bin or recovery window if a video gets deleted? No. Loom's permanent-deletion docs describe deletion as irreversible removal from its servers, after which the video can't be accessed even with the original link, and Loom Support can't recover it. There's no documented 30-day grace period — so pull copies before you delete anything to free up a slot.

Will my Loom share links keep working after I downgrade? Yes, as long as the video still exists — you retain access to your existing videos after a downgrade, so the links and embeds keep playing. They break only when a video is deleted (the one free way to make room under the 25-video cap), and that break is permanent.

Does the 5-minute cap shorten my existing recordings? No. The 5-minute limit applies to new screen recordings made on the free plan; it doesn't retroactively trim videos you already made. The 25-video lifetime cap is the one that affects your ability to keep recording.

How do I move a whole Loom library at once? Loom's own UI has no bulk export, and the free plan can't download at all. Our migration tool takes up to 20 Loom share links per run and lands each one in your Clipy library as a playable video, which is the closest thing to a one-shot library move.

If you only do one thing after reading this: open your Loom library, flag the recordings you'd genuinely miss, and run them through the Clipy Loom downloader while your account still has access. Once those MP4s are on your own disk, downgrading, hitting the cap, or cancelling Loom entirely all stop being scary — they go back to being ordinary billing decisions, which is what they should have been all along.