Gumlet Review 2026: The Plan Price Isn't the Bill

4.1 /5
4.1 4.1 out of 5

Our verdict

Gumlet is worth buying because it puts the whole job of publishing video into one subscription: upload and transcoding, CDN delivery, a player you can rebrand, AI subtitles, retention and drop-off analytics, live streaming, and the anti-piracy set — dynamic watermarking, geo and domain blocking, signed URLs and expiring tokens. The free plan is not a trial: 60 storage minutes, 100 GB of streaming a month and a player that already does 4K and HDR10, free forever with no card. Creator is $6 a month billed yearly and Business $99, and the yearly discounts on the video side are real, at 33.3% to 34.5%. What you have to understand first is the billing shape: all three paid tiers include exactly the same 3,000 GB of streaming a month, so the extra money buys storage minutes (1,000 to 3,000 to 15,000), seats, live minutes and features, plus a lower overage rate ($0.15, $0.10, $0.06 per GB). Storage overage is only purchasable on Business, and the billing docs describe storage as measured continuously rather than reset monthly. On the yearly prices, that puts the switch point at about 3,260 GB a month for Growth and about 5,000 GB for Business. Three more things to know before you buy: Gumlet gives two contradictory official answers about what a storage minute counts, DRM is a $99-a-month add-on whose FairPlay credentials the docs reserve for enterprise accounts, and image optimisation is a separate subscription whose Save 25% badge really reads 17.9% and 23.2%. Bottom line: if you stream under 3,000 GB a month and need a player plus protection, Creator or Growth billed yearly is the cheapest real answer at this level; if your bandwidth runs far past 5,000 GB a month, a per-minute host is easier to cost.

  • Price: Free $0; Creator $9 monthly or $6 billed yearly, Growth $29 or $19, Business $149 or $99; images are a separate subscription at $39 or $32 and $259 or $199
  • Allowances: all three paid video tiers include 3,000 GB of streaming a month; storage minutes are 1,000, 3,000 and 15,000; overage is $0.50 (free plan), $0.15, $0.10 and $0.06 per GB, and only Business can buy storage overage ($3 per 1,000 minutes a month, capped at 200,000)
  • Add-ons: DRM is $99 a month (100,000 views included, then $1 per 1,000); video custom CNAMEs are $5 a month each; AI features run on credits at $1 per 1,000, with subtitles at 10 credits a minute
  • Record: 49 AppSumo reviews average 4.43, but about 14% are one or two stars; the 99.9% uptime SLA's only remedy is a 5-day extension and the free plan is excluded from it

Last updated Pricing verified

Gumlet is a video hosting platform that puts the player, the CDN, AI subtitles, viewer analytics and live streaming on one subscription, at $6 a month billed yearly for Creator and $99 for Business, with a free plan that gives 60 storage minutes and 100 GB a month without a card. But all three paid tiers include the same 3,000 GB of streaming — what changes with the tier is the overage rate, and that is what this review is about.

What Gumlet is in 2026

Gumlet is not one of the AI video generators. It takes over the part after generation: upload the file, transcode it, put it on a CDN, wrap it in a player carrying your brand, control who can watch, then tell you where viewers leave. That sentence is the pitch, and it is also why it is worth a look before Vimeo or Wistia — those products are strong on marketing and collaboration surfaces, while Gumlet is strong on delivery itself: multi-resolution transcoding, adaptive bitrate, a global CDN, 4K and HDR10, an ad-free player, in-player CTAs and chapters, no-code lead capture forms, time-stamped comments, retention and drop-off analytics, live streaming, and the whole anti-piracy set of dynamic watermarking, geo and domain blocking, signed URLs and expiring access tokens.

Its customer list splits into consumer apps (Spinny, Tata 1mg, PocketFM, BookMyShow), commerce brands (Snapdeal, Asics, Ethos, IGP) and learning platforms (UWorld, BalanceTV, CareerLauncher). The vendor’s own scale figures are 8 billion-plus media deliveries a day, 12,000-plus apps and sites, and 4 million-plus videos streaming — those are the vendor’s numbers, useful only as evidence that the product is genuinely used, not as performance evidence.

Everything below was read first-hand on 1 October 2026: the pricing page in both billing modes, the feature comparison table and every pricing FAQ, the billing documentation (overage, subscription and refund policy, AI credits, affiliate program), the full terms of service, the DRM documentation, and the logged-in affiliate dashboard. No Gumlet account was created, no video was uploaded and no player was embedded for this review, so nothing here is a claim about how playback performs in production. That part is covered only by attributed first-hand user reports, in the section on what users say.

What Gumlet costs

The pricing page carries two separate plan sets behind Video and Image tabs, each with its own billing toggle. Read in both modes on 1 October 2026:

Plan, 1 Oct 2026MonthlyYearly (per month)Storage minutesStreamingOverage
Free$0$060100 GB$0.50/GB
Creator$9$6 — $72 a year1,0003,000 GB$0.15/GB
Growth$29$19 — $228 a year3,0003,000 GB$0.10/GB
Business$149$99 — $1,188 a year15,0003,000 GB$0.06/GB
Image Growth$39$32 — $384 a yearno image storage300 GB$0.15/GB
Image Business$259$199 — $2,388 a yearno image storage2,500 GB$0.08/GB
EnterpriseCustomCustomCustomCustomCustom
Creator, 12 × monthly $ 108 Creator yearly $ 72 Growth, 12 × monthly $ 348 Growth yearly $ 228 Business, 12 × monthly $ 1788 Business yearly $ 1188
Monthly figures are the monthly price × 12; yearly figures are the vendor's yearly monthly price × 12 ($72, $228, $1,188), which save 33.3%, 34.5% and 33.6%. Read on 1 October 2026, once in each billing mode.

The plan price is not the bill: all three paid tiers include the same bandwidth

This is the single thing to remember, and the pricing page will not volunteer it: Creator, Growth and Business all include 3,000 GB of streaming a month. Going from $9 to $149 — 16.6× on monthly billing — buys you this instead:

What you getCreatorGrowthBusiness
Storage minutes1,0003,00015,000
Seats2510
Live minutes a month1,0002,0004,000
Streaming a month3,000 GB3,000 GB3,000 GB
Bandwidth overage$0.15/GB$0.10/GB$0.06/GB
Storage overage availablenonenone$3 per 1,000 min, cap 200,000

So when your traffic grows, upgrading does not give you more bandwidth — it gives you a cheaper overage rate, more storage, more seats and more features. Anyone budgeting from bandwidth has to price the total themselves rather than read the card. From the published allowances and rates the switch points work out like this (our arithmetic, and both tie points divide exactly):

  • Monthly prices: Creator below 3,400 GB; Growth between 3,400 and 6,000 GB; Business above 6,000 GB. Check: $9 + $0.15 × 400 GB = $69, and $29 + $0.10 × 400 GB = $69; $29 + $0.10 × 3,000 GB = $329, and $149 + $0.06 × 3,000 GB = $329.
  • Yearly prices: Creator below 3,260 GB; Growth between 3,260 and 5,000 GB; Business above 5,000 GB. Check: $6 + $0.15 × 260 GB = $45, and $19 + $0.10 × 260 GB = $45; $19 + $0.10 × 2,000 GB = $219, and $99 + $0.06 × 2,000 GB = $219.

How much viewing is 3,000 GB? Using the 8 Mbps 1080p bitrate Cloudflare’s own docs recommend, a minute is about 60 MB and an hour about 3.6 GB, so 3,000 GB is roughly 833 hours of 1080p viewing (about 50,000 minutes). Put the other way: if your audience watches 4K or high-bitrate sources, the same 3,000 GB covers about half that runtime — billing by the GB means sharper video burns the allowance faster, and that is a premise you have to accept to choose this model.

Storage is harder than bandwidth: Free, Creator and Growth cannot buy storage overage at all, so running out means upgrading, and only Business can add it at $3 per 1,000 minutes a month up to 200,000 minutes. The billing docs also describe storage as measured continuously rather than reset monthly — a peak measure, not a monthly average, so one big import pushes it up. Three more add-ons worth knowing: DRM at $99 a month, video custom CNAMEs at $5 a month each, and AI credits at $1 per 1,000.

The yearly badge holds on video and fails on images

One billing toggle carries two discount badges, and only one survives division:

  • Video says “Save upto 35%”, and the real figures are $9 to $6 (33.3%), $29 to $19 (34.5%) and $149 to $99 (33.6%) — consistent with “up to 35%”.
  • Images say “Save 25%”, and the real figures are $39 to $32 (17.9%) and $259 to $199 (23.2%) — neither reaches 25%. Image Business at $199 a month billed yearly is also twice the top video tier’s $99, while its 2,500 GB allowance is lower than the 3,000 GB every paid video plan includes.

There are two official answers to what a storage minute is

Storage is one of Gumlet’s two metered units, and the vendor defines it two contradictory ways, both on its own site:

  • The pricing FAQ: one storage minute equals one minute of uploaded video regardless of file size or resolution; a 10-minute video uses 10 storage minutes; “we only count the original upload, not transcoded versions, so you can upload high-resolution files without burning through your limit.”
  • The billing documentation: the first listed cause of unexpected overage is “encoding at multiple resolutions — each rendition counts toward storage”.

Those point in opposite directions, and the difference is money: whether a 4K source transcoded into five renditions consumes one storage minute or six decides whether a library needs Business. Before you size a 4K library, send support your actual mix of footage and get the counting rule in writing — this is the one place in this review where the honest advice is “ask first”, because no third-party source can settle it for you.

The same billing page names three other real drivers of a bigger bill: a spike in views (one busy event can eat the allowance), leaving videos stored after removing them from your site (storage is charged until a video is actually deleted), and the current day’s bandwidth being excluded from the upcoming-invoice estimate, so the dashboard always reads a day behind the final bill. The vendor’s own mitigations are worth knowing too: upgrade when you approach the limit; an overage invoice raised on the free plan is voided if you upgrade before the cycle ends; and watch usage on the Billing page.

Gumlet versus Cloudflare Stream and Cloudflare Images

Gumlet publishes a whole “Cloudflare Stream alternative” page whose six reasons describe the rival as having no DRM, no dynamic watermarking, shallow analytics and extra charges for transcoding. Those are marketing conclusions, not this review’s conclusions. Read both vendors’ own documentation side by side, and the real difference is the billing unit, not the length of a feature list:

Dimension, 1 Oct 2026GumletCloudflare Stream
Billed onGB delivered ($0.06–$0.15/GB beyond 3,000 GB) plus minutes storedMinutes stored ($5 per 1,000 min a month, prepaid) plus minutes delivered ($1 per 1,000 min)
Does resolution change the bill?Yes: 4K costs far more GB per hour than 1080pNo: priced by duration regardless of bitrate
Free tierPermanent free plan (60 storage minutes, 100 GB a month)None, $5 a month minimum (1,000 minutes stored)
HDR4K and HDR10 on every tierHDR uploads are re-encoded and delivered as SDR
DRMWidevine and FairPlay as a $99-a-month add-on, FairPlay for enterprise accounts per the docsNo DRM
WatermarkingDynamic watermarking (can vary per viewer)Static image watermarks applied at upload via the API
Player featuresIn-player CTAs, chapters, no-code lead capture, time-stamped commentsA basic player; no CTAs, chapters or lead capture
After cancellingVideos stay in the dashboard to download or reactivateVideos are deleted 30 days after the subscription lapses

A worked comparison on the published rates (our arithmetic, not a vendor quote): a library of 2,000 storage minutes delivering 50,000 minutes of 1080p a month (8 Mbps, about 3,000 GB, about 833 hours). Gumlet on Growth billed yearly is $19 a month with no overage; Cloudflare Stream is 2 × $5 = $10 of storage plus 50 × $1 = $50 of delivery, so $60 a month. Push it to 5,000 GB a month: Gumlet Growth yearly is $19 + $0.10 × 2,000 GB = $219, while Cloudflare is $10 + $83 = $93 — the crossing point is around 3,500 GB a month, above which per-minute billing is clearly cheaper. Two details belong next to that number: Cloudflare rounds delivery up to 4-second segments and bills client-side preloading and buffering (browser cache is not billed), and with no free tier, 1,001 minutes of storage costs $10 because storage is bought in 1,000-minute blocks.

Images are a different story. Cloudflare Images gives 5,000 unique image transformations a month free for images you already store elsewhere, then charges $0.50 per 1,000 unique transformations (first 5,000 included), $5 per 100,000 images stored and $1 per 100,000 delivered — counted per image, not per GB. Gumlet Image has no equivalent free entry: 30 GB on the free plan, then from $32–$39 a month. So if your only goal is making images lighter and your image set is fairly stable, Cloudflare’s free allowance may already cover you; Gumlet’s image line suits teams that want one console, custom domains and more sources. Measure before buying either way, and Gumlet happens to supply the ruler for free: its image audit takes a URL, runs Google Lighthouse, and reports image weight, format, sizing and missing alt text, stating that the result is independent of which vendor you use.

What it does well

It collects the whole job of getting video online into one account. Upload, multi-resolution transcoding, adaptive bitrate, a global CDN, a rebrandable ad-free player, in-player CTAs and chapters, no-code lead capture, time-stamped comments, retention and drop-off analytics, live streaming, dynamic watermarking, geo and domain blocking, signed URLs and expiring tokens are switches inside one subscription rather than a feature list — so a course business is not stitching a CDN to a player to a piracy plugin to a captioning tool, and it gets one bill rather than four.

The free plan is a real free plan, not a demo: 60 storage minutes, 100 GB of streaming a month, 60 minutes of live streaming and one seat, with 4K and HDR10, an ad-free player, password protection and geo-blocking — no card, and the vendor’s own words that it is not a trial and is free forever. 4K and HDR10 on the free tier is rare at this price, since Cloudflare Stream re-encodes HDR to SDR. A product site with a handful of promo videos can stay at $0 permanently.

The prices are cheap for the category. Creator billed yearly is $6 a month for 1,000 storage minutes and 3,000 GB; Growth is $19 for 3,000 storage minutes, 5 seats and 2,000 live minutes. Comparable hosted platforms charge considerably more for the same allowances, and the yearly discount is genuine — all three tiers above 33%, every one checkable by division.

The overage rate falls as you move up instead of rising. $0.15 to $0.10 to $0.06 per GB rewards a growing site rather than penalising it: on the yearly prices, crossing about 3,260 GB means Growth and about 5,000 GB means Business, and each move is net cheaper rather than net more expensive.

Piracy protection is more than a toggle. Dynamic watermarking, geo and domain restrictions, signed URLs and expiring access tokens are in the product, with Widevine and FairPlay DRM as a $99-a-month add-on (100,000 views included). Limit sharing, regions and access windows, and trace a leak, in one dashboard.

The exit terms are more generous than the category norm. The billing docs promise a 30-day no-questions-asked full refund; you can cancel any time with service to the end of the cycle; and after cancelling your videos stay in the dashboard to download or reactivate, where Cloudflare Stream deletes them after 30 days. One terms-level point deserves its own sentence: customer content is not used to train generative AI models, third-party LLM calls opt out of training, and analytics collection can be switched off — stated in both the terms and the FAQ.

What users report

Start with the corpus itself. Independently trustworthy public evidence about Gumlet is thin. Searching Reddit across eleven keyword sets (with a bunny.net control returning a full page, so the channel was working), exactly one thread asks directly what Gumlet is like; the remaining first-hand reports are scattered across Vimeo migration threads, a Patreon thread and r/gumlet, about a dozen in total. Alongside that sits a clear promotional footprint: two accounts post polished Gumlet recommendations in r/vimeo and then reappear as questioners in Gumlet’s own r/SaaS AMA; three low-karma single-purpose accounts drop unsolicited praise such as “Gumlet!!!!!” in unrelated subreddits; in 2024 an r/vimeo poster publicly accused Gumlet of fake reviews; and a 32-member r/videohosting subreddit looks vendor-run, with the co-founder posting in it. None of that changes what the product does — but it changes how you should read the “user recommendations” you find, which cannot be treated as independent evidence.

First-hand accounts with a traceable history, on the positive side:

  • A film and video professional using it as a Vimeo alternative for several months: “Mostly very good. Definitely recommend… Occasional bug, but they are responsive to fix. UI can be confusing, but no more than Vimeo’s.”
  • An organisation making educational content for children: many schools block YouTube, so it needed an alternative host, and Vimeo raised its price sharply after about a year because of bandwidth use — “as long as Gumlet sticks to their promise of unlimited bandwidth, it is the solution we’ve been looking for.”
  • A documentary maker: “I’m using Gumlet as a Vimeo alternative and their free plan gives plenty for a film-maker and indie company.”
  • Another buyer cites DRM and dynamic watermarking as the reason to choose it for proprietary content.
  • The positive themes match the AppSumo corpus: adaptive playback, colour accuracy, player customisation, retention and geography analytics, importing from Vimeo, and being faster than Vimeo.

And the negatives, from equally traceable accounts:

  • Changes take too long to appear. One user reported that editing a playlist or a video’s details “takes forever to actually show up… the changes don’t show up for days sometimes”, surviving cleared caches, different browsers and different devices, “this way since day one” — and moved to Frame.io.
  • Share thumbnails broke. A long-running Patreon creator who migrated from Vimeo found share previews turning into question marks or black boxes, with switching stills and uploading custom thumbnails both failing: “a big No No for people paying for my Patreon.”
  • The domain allowlist can lock you out. An r/gumlet user added their own domain to the whitelist and was still told the site was unauthorised to show the video; nobody answered the thread.
  • Interoperability with outside tools. One user could not download their own Gumlet videos with yt-dlp, including via the cookie method.
  • Mismatched expectations about terms. Some buyers read “unlimited bandwidth” as a promise — that language came from the lifetime-deal round — while retail plans meter GB against a 3,000 GB allowance. Check which set of terms you are buying.

The 49 AppSumo reviews (same product, different commercial terms): an average of 4.43, but the distribution carries more information — 39 five-star, 2 four-star, 1 three-star, 4 two-star, 3 one-star, so about 14% sit at one or two stars, high for a lifetime deal. The recurring themes:

  • A January 2025 update broke embedded playback. Several reviews point at the same incident: videos offline for more than 12 hours in some cases, with roughly a fifth still broken after 24 hours. One reviewer wrote it up as the reason the service is “too unreliable for anything serious”. It is the heaviest negative fact in this review, and a reminder to make your own pages degrade gracefully when playback depends on a third party.
  • Support times measured in hours to days, against the Business-tier promise of priority live chat.
  • Slow uploads and a conflict with the Divi builder.
  • The positive themes cluster the same way as the Reddit reports: playback and adaptive bitrate, colour accuracy, DRM and watermarking, player customisation, retention and geography analytics, Vimeo import and geo-blocking.

One caveat on scope: those reviews judge the lifetime deal’s commercial terms, which differ from today’s retail plans in both allowances and overage rules. The product-level reports are usable; the prices are not — the “Gumlet for $79 one-time” you will find online comes from that sold-out tier.

Platform-level totals could not be verified at source — G2, Capterra and TrustRadius all return 403 and Trustpilot’s own page would not load, its indexed title saying 4.8 out of 5 where a third-party snapshot says 4.5 — so we quote none of those scores.

Prices in third-party directories are frequently stale or wrong, which is why every table here carries its read date: one directory files Gumlet under “Web Acceleration” and lists its price as “From 0.00 $”, and an AI-generated comparison page claims its pricing was “checked Sep 2026” while leaving Gumlet’s rows as N/A and pasting in an unrelated MongoDB recommendation. Every number on this page was read from the vendor’s own site on 1 October 2026.

One data-quality note runs the other way. The vendor’s own press release calls DRM’s industry average “$500 a month”, while published rates put Bunny’s MediaCage DRM at $99 a month base and Mux’s at $100 — Gumlet’s $99 is competitive, but it is not an industry price cut in half. Do not get excited by that number.

How Gumlet scores

Features 4.5
Ease of use 4.5
Value for money 4.0
Support 3.5

Features 4.5. One product covers hosting, transcoding, CDN, player, subtitling, analytics, live streaming and anti-piracy, and each part has real depth: AI usage is charged only on success at $1 per 1,000 credits with published per-minute rates, protection is six switches rather than one, and 4K with HDR10 is not withheld from the free plan. The missing half-point covers two structural gaps: no broadcast-grade live monetisation or white-label OTT, and the reachability of DRM, since FairPlay is enterprise-only. Neither affects most buyers; both force some buyers elsewhere.

Ease of use 4.5. Self-serve, no sales call, a free tier with no card, a vendor claim of streaming your first video in three minutes, and a customer story of migrating 5,000 videos in three hours. The deduction is not about starting but about operating at scale: slow uploads, slow support and a builder conflict recur in AppSumo reviews, and one user’s embed-field complaint is a workflow tax rather than a setup problem.

Value 4. The free plan is not a demo, and $6 a month billed yearly for 1,000 storage minutes and 3,000 GB is cheap for this category, with overage rates that fall as you climb. Two things cost it a point: all three paid tiers include the same bandwidth, so upgrading does not buy more of the thing that grows, and images are a second subscription whose discount badge does not hold. If you need video and images, expect two bills.

Support 3.5. The terms side reads well: a 30-day no-questions-asked refund, cancel any time, videos still downloadable after cancelling. But the evidence about support capacity is thin and tilted: priority live chat starts at Business, the 99.9% uptime SLA pays only a 5-day extension and must be claimed within 10 days with logs, the free plan is excluded, and AppSumo carries multiple “waited a long time” accounts. For a service that holds your videos, this should not be the weakest dimension.

Pros

  • The free plan is genuinely free rather than a trial: 60 storage minutes, 100 GB of streaming a month, 60 minutes of live streaming, with 4K and HDR10, an ad-free player, password protection and geo-blocking, no card and no stated expiry — so a small site can run real playback before paying anything
  • The yearly discount survives division: $9 to $6, $29 to $19 and $149 to $99 are 33.3%, 34.5% and 33.6%, consistent with the badge up to 35% — commit for a year and the same allowance costs about a third less
  • Video hosting, the player, the CDN, AI subtitles, viewer analytics, live streaming and piracy protection live in one account, so you are not stitching a CDN to a player to a captioning tool; the integration list covers Zapier, Pabbly, Zoom, S3, Google Drive, Dropbox and iFramely, oEmbed and Embedly
  • 4K and HDR10 are available on every tier including the free one, which is rare at this price: Cloudflare Stream explicitly re-encodes HDR uploads and delivers them in SDR
  • The protection toolkit is complete: dynamic watermarking, geo and domain blocking, signed URLs and expiring access tokens, plus Widevine and FairPlay DRM as a separate purchase — course and membership content does not need a second vendor to be protected
  • The overage rate falls as you move up rather than rising ($0.15 to $0.10 to $0.06 per GB), so heavier bandwidth users are rewarded for upgrading instead of penalised — on the yearly prices, moving from Creator to Growth pays for itself above roughly 3,260 GB a month, and to Business above roughly 5,000 GB
  • The exit terms are unusually generous: the billing docs promise a 30-day no-questions-asked full refund, you can cancel at any time with service running to the end of the cycle, and after cancelling your videos stay in the dashboard so you can download them or reactivate
  • The data and AI position is stated in both the terms and the FAQ: customer content is not used to train generative AI models, third-party LLM calls opt out of training, and analytics collection can be switched off in settings
  • AI usage is transparent metered rather than a black box: $1 equals 1,000 credits, subtitles cost 10 credits a minute, translation 5 a minute per language, chapters and descriptions 5 a minute each, the docs publish worked examples, and only successful operations are charged

Cons

  • The plan price is not the bill: all three paid tiers include the same 3,000 GB a month, so upgrading buys storage minutes, seats, live minutes and features plus a cheaper overage rate ($0.15 to $0.10 to $0.06 per GB). Budget from your bandwidth, not from the number on the card
  • Storage is a hard ceiling on the cheaper tiers: Free, Creator and Growth have no storage overage to buy at all, and only Business can add it at $3 per 1,000 minutes a month up to 200,000 minutes — while the billing docs describe storage as measured continuously rather than reset monthly, which is a peak measure, not an average. Custom domains are another $5 a month each
  • Gumlet gives two answers to what a storage minute is: the pricing FAQ says it counts only the original upload and not transcoded versions, while the billing docs list encoding at multiple resolutions as a common cause of unexpected overage, with each rendition counting toward storage. Ask support which rule applies before sizing a 4K library
  • DRM is a $99-a-month add-on, and the docs say FairPlay credentials are for enterprise accounts only and take 7 to 10 working days, while DRM is applied during processing — an existing library is unprotected until each video is reprocessed. Confirm FairPlay eligibility on a self-serve plan before paying
  • Images are a second subscription, and that subscription's discount badge is wrong: Image Growth and Business read 17.9% and 23.2% off, not the advertised 25%, and Image Business at $199 a month billed yearly costs twice the top video tier. Video plus images means two bills
  • Real problems appear in the user record: AppSumo carries 49 reviews at 4.43 average but about 14% are one or two stars, with recurring reports of a January 2025 update breaking embedded playback (offline for more than 12 hours across sites), slow uploads and support taking hours to days; one long-term user notes most site builders only offer Vimeo or YouTube embed fields, so Gumlet means pasting HTML. The uptime SLA only remedy is a 5-day extension and the free plan is excluded from it

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free plan, and is it a trial?

A real free plan, not a trial. The pricing FAQ says “Absolutely. It’s not a trial, and it’s free forever.” It includes 60 storage minutes, 100 GB of streaming a month, 60 minutes of live streaming and one seat, with 4K and HDR10, an ad-free player, password protection and geo-blocking, and no card. Two things to note: streaming beyond 100 GB is still billed at $0.50 per GB, and free-plan accounts are not covered by the 99.9% uptime SLA.

So what does Gumlet actually cost?

Video: Free $0; Creator $9 a month or $6 billed yearly ($72 a year); Growth $29 or $19 ($228); Business $149 or $99 ($1,188); Enterprise quoted. Images are a separate subscription: Free 30 GB, Image Growth $39 or $32, Image Business $259 or $199. There is no time-limited trial — the paid buttons subscribe directly, and the alternatives are the permanent free plan and the 30-day no-questions-asked refund the billing docs promise.

Why do you say the plan price is not the bill?

Because all three paid tiers include 3,000 GB of streaming a month, and only the overage rate ($0.15 / $0.10 / $0.06), storage, seats, live minutes and features change with the tier. A site whose usage sits at exactly 3,000 GB pays the same bandwidth cost on Creator as on Business — the extra $140 buys something else. Run the numbers on 6,000 GB and it shows: Creator is $9 + $450 = $459, Growth is $29 + $300 = $329, Business is $149 + $180 = $329. Work out your GB first, then pick the tier.

What counts as a storage minute?

The vendor gives two contradictory answers, quoted in full above: the pricing FAQ counts only the original upload and not transcoded versions, while the billing docs list each rendition as counting towards storage. No third-party source can settle this. Send support your actual mix of footage — duration, resolution, bitrate — and get the counting rule confirmed in writing before you size a library.

Is Gumlet cheaper or more expensive than Cloudflare Stream?

It depends on whether your viewing fits inside 3,000 GB. Inside the allowance Gumlet is cheaper (it has a free plan, and Growth billed yearly is $19 for 3,000 GB, while Cloudflare Stream has no free tier and a $5-a-month minimum); beyond it Cloudflare is cheaper, because its delivery is $1 per 1,000 minutes regardless of resolution while Gumlet’s overage is per GB and high bitrates burn GB faster. For a 2,000-minute library at 1080p the crossing point is around 3,500 GB a month. Cloudflare Stream also has no DRM and re-encodes HDR to SDR, so if you need DRM, HDR, or in-player CTAs, chapters and lead capture, the price gap should not be your first consideration.

Does DRM cost extra, and can a self-serve plan use FairPlay?

Yes, it costs extra. The pricing page sells DRM at $99 a month as an add-on to any paid plan, with 100,000 views included and $1 per 1,000 views after that; only Enterprise includes it. But the DRM docs also say FairPlay credentials are for enterprise accounts only and take 7 to 10 working days — the two statements coexist, and this review cannot decide whether a self-serve plan can obtain FairPlay, so confirm with sales before paying. DRM is also applied during processing, so an existing library needs each video reprocessed to be protected.

Can I cancel, and how do refunds work?

Cancel any time, with service running to the end of the billing cycle (cancelling mid-cycle does not prorate, because billing was never prorated in your favour either). The billing docs add something better for buyers: a 30-day no-questions-asked full refund on request to support. After cancelling, your videos stay in your dashboard so you can download them or reactivate — friendlier than Cloudflare Stream, which deletes videos 30 days after a subscription lapses. Note that the terms of service separately say there is no refund on termination, which covers being terminated for abuse.

Do I have to buy image optimisation separately?

Yes. Image is the second tab on the pricing page and a separate plan set: Free at 30 GB of bandwidth ($0.50 per GB overage), Image Growth at $39 a month ($32 billed yearly, 300 GB, $0.15 per GB) and Image Business at $259 a month ($199, 2,500 GB, $0.08 per GB), with unlimited image processing requests on every tier and no image storage — originals stay in your own S3 or GCS bucket while Gumlet transforms and delivers. Measure your pages with its free image audit before buying: if you only need lighter images and your image set is stable, Cloudflare Images’ free 5,000 unique transformations a month may be enough.

When should I not choose Gumlet?

See the warning box above: broadcast-grade live monetisation or a white-label OTT app; FairPlay DRM needed within days; bandwidth far beyond 5,000 GB a month where cost predictability matters most; a site builder that only accepts Vimeo or YouTube embeds; or support latency treated as business-critical. In those five cases, Gumlet is not the answer.

The bottom line

Gumlet is worth buying because it collects the whole job of publishing video into one subscription, and no part of it is nominal: multi-resolution transcoding with adaptive bitrate, a global CDN, a rebrandable player, AI subtitles and chapters, retention and drop-off analytics, live streaming, dynamic watermarking and geo-blocking, with dual DRM available at $99 a month when you need it. The free plan is not a demo — 60 storage minutes, 100 GB a month, 4K and HDR10, no card, no expiry — and Creator at $6 a month billed yearly (Business at $99) carries a genuine yearly discount above 33%.

What you have to understand first is also the most valuable thing in this review: all three paid tiers include the same bandwidth. The difference between $9 and $149 is storage minutes, seats, live minutes, features and the overage rate ($0.15 / $0.10 / $0.06 per GB) — not throughput. So the right order is work out your monthly GB, then pick the tier: on yearly prices, Creator below 3,260 GB, Growth between 3,260 and 5,000 GB, Business above 5,000 GB. If your arithmetic lands far above 5,000 GB, price a per-minute host instead. Add the two facts nobody else publishes — the vendor’s two contradictory definitions of a storage minute, and FairPlay being documented as enterprise-only — and the picture is complete.

So do three things before you buy:

  • Prove the delivery chain on the free plan. 60 storage minutes and 100 GB a month with no card is enough to rebrand the player, test password protection and geo-blocking, and see how the console reports usage; the ceilings you will hit are 60 storage minutes and 100 GB.
  • Calculate your monthly bandwidth, then use the switch points. Under 3,000 GB, buy Creator billed yearly ($6 a month); between 3,260 and 5,000 GB, move to Growth ($19); above 5,000 GB, price Cloudflare Stream or Mux first, because Gumlet’s $0.06 per GB grows quickly at high bitrates.
  • If you need protection, settle the two DRM questions first. Ask sales whether a self-serve plan can obtain FairPlay, whether reprocessing an existing library costs extra, and which storage-minute counting rule applies — the original upload or every rendition.

Current plans, overage rates and the image audit are all on Gumlet’s site: plans and rates on the Gumlet pricing page, your own image weight via the free image audit, and the product as a whole on Gumlet’s site. For the condensed version — every price, allowance and score on one page — see Gumlet pricing and plans; if you are still choosing, compare the other video hosting line we reviewed, Panda Video, or browse other video and media tools.