Hit Loom's 5-minute limit? If you don't need the share link, you don't need $18/month.

Loom's free tier caps you at 5 minutes, 25 videos, and 720p — past that it's $18 per user per month. But Loom's real product is the share link and hosting. If you just need a video file to attach, recording locally is faster and cheaper.

Have you been cut off at five minutes mid-explanation in Loom?

The instinct at that moment is to consider upgrading. Then you look at the price: Business is $18 per user per month, and annual billing only trims it by about 17%.

Before paying, it’s worth asking: what part of Loom are you actually using?

The free tier’s limits

From the official pricing page, Starter (free) caps at:

25 videos per person
5-minute recordings
720p quality
Up to 50 workspace members

Plan	Price
Starter (free)	$0
Business	$18/user/mo (up to 17% off annually)
Business + AI	$24/user/mo

A five-person team on Business is $1,080 a year.

What Loom is really selling

Loom’s core isn’t the recorder. It’s that the moment you stop recording, there’s a URL, and the recipient watches it in a browser with nothing installed.

Everything valuable clusters around that:

Viewer analytics — who watched, and how far
Comments and reactions on the video
Workspace sharing for teams
Automatic transcription and summaries (AI plan)
Embedding

If you need that sharing infrastructure, Loom has essentially no substitute. Customer explanations, async team communication, sales follow-ups — replacing a file transfer with a link is worth real money.

When you don’t need the link

But plenty of usage looks like this:

The recording gets pasted straight into Slack
It’s attached to an email
It’s uploaded and embedded in an internal wiki
It’s saved as a file to build documentation from

In those cases what you need is a video file, not hosting. Routing through Loom adds a step — get the recipient to open a URL — and more if they’re external and permissions are involved.

For that usage, the 5-minute and 720p caps are beside the point. Record locally and hand over the file.

	Loom	MacSide AI
Length limit	5 min free / unlimited paid	None
Quality	720p free / up to 4K paid	Local export
Share links	Yes	—
Viewer analytics, comments	Yes	—
Auto transcription	Yes (AI plan)	—
Auto-zoom on clicks	—	Yes
On-screen keystroke display	—	Yes
Post-recording editing (speed, background, cursor)	Basic editing	Yes
Price	$18/user/mo	$2.99/mo or $59.99 one-time

For how-to videos, the priorities differ

There’s also a difference in what the tools optimize for.

Loom is strong for talking someone through something: your face, your voice, a link. That’s the right shape for sales and team updates.

Videos that show a procedure need different things: where you clicked, which key you pressed, where to look on screen.

MacSide AI’s recording studio leans that way — automatic zoom on the click location, keystrokes rendered on screen, and post-recording control over speed, cursor, and background (details here).

For documentation, zoom and keystroke display beat share links.

How to decide

Does the recipient need a URL? If yes, Loom. Nothing here substitutes.
Do you use viewer analytics or comments? If yes, Loom.
Neither, and the 5-minute cap is your only problem? Recording locally is cheaper and faster.

Group three is bigger than it looks. If your habit is “record in Loom, download it, paste it in Slack,” the Loom round trip isn’t buying you anything.

Frequently asked questions

No. It exports a file. If you need URL sharing, use Loom or something with hosting.

Is there a length limit?

No — length is bounded by disk space.

Can a team use it?

It’s an app on an individual Mac; there are no workspaces or team management features.

Does it transcribe automatically?

Not video. Text visible on screen can be extracted with OCR.

Can I use both?

Yes, and splitting them is sensible: Loom for customer-facing sharing, local recording for internal documentation.

A limit is a good moment to re-examine

Free-tier limits are annoying, but they’re also a prompt to check what you’re doing.

Getting cut at five minutes means you’re recording substantial explanations. The question at that point isn’t “should I upgrade?” — it’s how will the recipient watch this?

Watching at a URL makes $18/month reasonable. Downloading it first means you’re paying for hosting you don’t use.