Loom's free plan limits, explained (and how to dodge the wall)

If you're on Loom's free plan and wondering why the record button suddenly stopped cooperating, this post is for you. The limits are real, they're tighter than most people realise when they sign up, and one of them is permanent.

The two walls

Wall one: 25 videos, lifetime. Not per month. Lifetime. Every recording you make on Loom Starter counts toward a total of 25, and when you hit it, that's it. Delete old videos to free up slots or start paying. If you record a couple of quick videos a day for work, you'll hit this wall inside a fortnight.

Wall two: 5 minutes per recording. Every free recording stops at the 5 minute mark. Mid-sentence, mid-demo, doesn't matter. If you've ever tried to walk someone through a gnarly bug or a full feature demo, you know 5 minutes disappears fast. You end up doing take two with a speedrun mentality, which defeats the whole point of recording instead of writing.

There are smaller catches too (720p caps, no downloading your own videos on free, the AI features sitting on the US$24/user/month tier), but the two walls above are the ones that actually stop you mid-week.

Why it's like this

Loom didn't always have these limits. The free plan used to be genuinely generous, then Atlassian bought Loom in late 2023 for about US$975 million, and the free tier got cut back hard. I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't tighten a free plan too if I'd just spent a billion dollars (I would, and I'd probably do it faster). But it does mean a lot of people signed up for one deal and are now living with another.

What to do when you hit the wall

Option one: pay Loom. Business is US$18/user/month, and the plan with the AI everyone actually wants is US$24/user/month. For a team that lives in Atlassian products, that might be fine.

Option two: stop hosting every recording. A lot of what people record never needed a cloud link in the first place. A recording you're going to send to one person once can just be a file.

Option three, and yes, this is the part where I mention my own product: use a tool with different walls. I build Tape, and I've deliberately put the limits in different places. On Tape's free plan, local recording is unlimited and downloads are unlimited, at any length. No 5 minute cut-off, ever, on any plan. Hosting is where the free cap sits: 5 hosted videos with shareable pages at a time. Fewer slots than Loom's 25, I'll be upfront about that, but every one of them can be a full hour if you need it, you can download everything you record, and you can export to your own Google Drive or OneDrive for free.

The philosophy is simple: the recording is yours. The thing you pay for is unlimited hosted sharing and unlimited AI summaries, and that's A$8 a month (about US$5.65), or A$79 a year. Not per seat, because there are no seats.

The short version

Loom free: 25 videos ever, 5 minutes each, no downloads. Tape free: 5 hosted videos at a time, any length, unlimited local recording and downloads. Pick the walls that annoy you least. If you want to see how the paid tiers stack up too, the full comparison table is on the pricing page, with dates on the numbers so you know they're current.

And if you just want to try it: hit record. You don't even need an account until you want to share something.