📺 Signboard
Every screen you own, one price, forever. Self-hosted digital signage.
Signboard at a glance
| Price | $129, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Yodeck at $8/screen/mo — roughly $96 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Utilities |
Signboard features
🗂️ Content library
Images, videos (mp4/webm), web-page URLs, and announcement slides built from 5 layout templates — a "Closed Friday" slide takes 20 seconds, no designer required.
🎞️ Playlists
Ordered items with per-entry duration overrides, drag-to-reorder, cut/fade transitions, in-browser preview.
🔢 6-character pairing
The player page shows a code; type it into the dashboard, name the screen, assign a playlist. Any smart-TV browser, a Pi in kiosk Chromium, or an old tablet all work — no player app.
🕐 Server-side dayparting
"Mon-Fri 07:00-11:00 → Breakfast Menu" — evaluated in the screen's own IANA timezone, not the kiosk's often-wrong clock. Priority-ordered rules, visual weekly grid.
💓 Screen health dashboard
Live grid: online/offline, last-seen, currently-playing item, reported resolution, player version.
⚡ Live updates
Playlist and schedule edits push to affected players instantly over WebSocket, with a 60s poll fallback.
📴 Offline caching
A service worker pre-caches the current playlist's media, so a dropped connection mid-loop doesn't blank the screen — and evicts stale media so a Pi's SD card doesn't fill up.
🚨 Emergency takeover
Push one slide to every paired screen instantly; clear it with one click.
$129 once — that's the whole pricing page
Yodeck charges $8/screen/mo — roughly $96 a year, every year. Signboard is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Signboard inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Signboard guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/signboard-mvp. The $129 buys the packaged installer, guided VPS deploy and lifetime updates instead of doing the docker compose setup yourself.
What hardware do the screens need?
Anything with a browser: a smart TV's built-in browser, a $35 Raspberry Pi in kiosk Chromium, an old Fire tablet. The player is plain ES2017-safe JavaScript built for ancient smart-TV browsers, with double-buffered swaps to avoid flicker.
Does offline caching always work?
Honest caveat: browsers only allow service workers on HTTPS or localhost. On a plain-http LAN address the player degrades gracefully to no-cache mode — it still plays fine, it just re-fetches media each loop. For real offline resilience put a reverse proxy with TLS (or Tailscale) in front, or run the desktop app, which loads 127.0.0.1 and gets full caching.