If you logged into Loom and found your free plan gone — or worse, an invoice you did not expect — you are not alone. Here is what happened and how to respond.
What Creator Lite was
Creator Lite was Loom’s free creator tier. A lot of small teams and individuals lived on it happily: record the occasional walkthrough, share a link, never pay. After the Atlassian acquisition, that tier was discontinued.
What actually changed
Two things caught people out:
- The free creator tier went away. Workspaces that relied on it were moved onto paid plans.
- Dormant seats can become billable. In a per-seat model, someone added to a workspace once — who has not recorded since — can still count as a paid creator. Teams with a handful of active recorders and a long tail of inactive accounts saw bills jump sharply, and a few reported increases of an order of magnitude.
What to do right now
- Audit your seats. Remove inactive creators before your next renewal so you are not paying for accounts nobody uses.
- Decide: downgrade or leave. If you only want to stop paying, you can often downgrade. If the per-seat math no longer fits how your team records, it is worth looking around — see how to cancel your Loom subscription.
- Separate viewers from creators. The people who only watch your videos should never cost you money.
A free plan that stays free
This is exactly the gap Chairkick fills: a genuinely free tier (4K recordings up to 10 minutes, 30 videos), AI summaries and transcripts built in, and one simple rule — viewers are always free. You only pay for the people who record. Switching takes about two minutes: paste your Loom links and import them.