The price anchor
| Signboard | Yodeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $8/screen/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $96 |
| 5-year total | $129 | $480 |
| 10-year total | $129 | $960 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($8/screen/mo, ~$96/yr); the Signboard column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
On a single screen Signboard pays for itself vs Yodeck in about 16 months. On five screens, 3 months — then it's $0 a year, forever.
- After 1 year: Signboard has cost you $129 total — Yodeck has cost $96.
- After 3 years: Signboard is still $129 — the subscription is at $288.
- After 5 years: Signboard is still $129 — the subscription is at $480.
What you get for $129 once
- 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.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $129 is the whole price.
Pricing questions
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.
How does scheduling handle wrong clocks on kiosk devices?
All daypart rules are evaluated server-side in each screen's own IANA timezone — the kiosk's (often drifting, often wrong) hardware clock is never trusted.
Signboard — $129, one time
Or get Signboard plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.