How to download your Loom videos before you cancel

Quick warning before you cancel your Loom plan: get your videos out first. The moment the paid plan lapses you're back on the free tier's rules, and the free tier does not let you download your own recordings. Cancel in the wrong order and everything you ever recorded becomes watch-only, on someone else's servers, behind a paywall you just walked away from.

So the order matters: export, then cancel. Here's the export part, including the annoying bits Loom's cancellation page won't mention. (If it's the bill that's pushed you here, I've done the price maths on the alternatives separately.)

Step 1: work out what's worth keeping

Be ruthless here. Most screen recordings are disposable by nature, the bug report got fixed, the demo shipped, the "quick question" got answered in 2024. Open your library, sort by date, and shortlist the ones that still earn their disk space: onboarding walkthroughs, client handovers, anything you'd genuinely re-send. In my experience that's maybe one recording in ten.

Step 2: download them, one at a time

While your paid plan is still active, open each video and use the download option (it lives in the video page's menu). You'll get an MP4. Do this for everything on your shortlist.

Here's the annoying part: as of writing, Loom has no bulk "export my library" button. If you have 200 videos, that's 200 trips through the menu. There are community scripts floating around that automate it by scraping your library, but you're trusting a random script with your logged-in session, so I'd keep the shortlist short instead. This is also a lesson worth banking: the time to check how you get your data out of a tool is before you put three years of it in.

Step 3: check the ones that matter

Play the first minute of anything important after it downloads. Audio present, video not corrupted, right recording under the right filename (Loom names the file after the video title, which is only helpful if you titled things better than I do). Boring advice, but the day you need the client-handover video is exactly the day you'll discover the download silently failed.

Step 4: put them somewhere that's actually yours

A folder in your Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, a NAS if you're that kind of person (respect). The point of this whole exercise is that the next tool shouldn't be able to do this to you either, so land the files somewhere you control before you decide what comes next.

Step 5: now cancel

With the files safely out, cancel away. Your existing hosted videos stay watchable on the free plan (within its limits), but you've got the copies that matter, so the limits stop being leverage.

And next time, pick a tool where this step doesn't exist

This is the part where I mention my own product, clearly labelled as such: I build Tape, and this exact scenario is why the free plan works the way it does. Recording happens locally in your browser, downloads are unlimited and free at any length on every plan, and you can export straight to your own Google Drive or OneDrive as you go. There is no plan where your recordings go watch-only, and there never will be, because I've just spent a whole post explaining why that's a rubbish thing to do to people.

When you record your next walkthrough, try it in the browser. Free, no install, no account needed until you want a share link, and the download button never goes away.