Yodeck is one of the best-liked names in small-business digital signage, and deservedly so. It is affordable by category standards, easy to set up, offers preloaded Raspberry Pi players, and its free single-screen tier is a genuinely generous way to run one lobby TV. For a category historically full of enterprise pricing, Yodeck made signage approachable.
But the model is per screen, per month, forever: $8/screen/month means a modest five-screen setup — a café with menu boards, a gym, a dental office — costs $480 a year, $1,440 over three years, for what is at its core a scheduled slideshow with a health dashboard. Signboard is that product, self-hosted: $49 once, unlimited screens, any browser as a player.
What Yodeck does well
Yodeck gets the fundamentals right:
- A free tier for a single screen — genuinely useful, not just a demo.
- Preloaded Raspberry Pi players shipped to you — hardware and software as one solved problem.
- A big app ecosystem: weather, news tickers, dashboards, social walls.
- Solid scheduling, offline caching on players, and a management console built for non-technical staff.
If you run one screen, Yodeck's free tier is honestly hard to beat — use it and pay nobody.
Where the subscription model hurts
The per-screen meter is the whole story. Screen two starts the billing, and the bill scales with exactly the thing you want to grow: $8/screen/month is $96 per screen per year, indefinitely. Five screens over three years is $1,440; ten screens is $2,880 — rent, forever, on TVs you already own, showing content you already made. Franchise or multi-site operators feel this hardest, which is precisely who the pricing is designed around.
Your content, playlists and schedules also live in Yodeck's cloud, dependent on their service continuing on terms you like. And each screen wants their player app or their Pi image. Signboard's answer is a 6-character pairing code in any browser — a smart TV's built-in browser, a $35 Pi in kiosk Chromium, an old Fire tablet — with no per-device account and no app store between you and your own screens.
Signboard: the pay-once alternative
Signboard is a $49, one-time purchase. Every screen you own, one price, forever. Self-hosted digital signage. Signboard runs as one Node process — admin, API, player and media — against one SQLite file. Playlist and schedule edits push to affected screens instantly over WebSocket with a 60-second poll as fallback, and announcement slides come from five built-in layout templates so a "Closed Friday" screen takes 20 seconds to make. Docker on a $5 VPS, or a Windows desktop app that doubles as a kiosk player. MIT source.
The source code is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/signboard — free to build and run yourself, forever. Buying the packaged version on Whop gets you the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates. Either way, there is no account, no telemetry and no renewal date.
Head to head
| Signboard | Yodeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $8/screen/mo |
| Cost over 3 years | $49 | ~$1,440 (5 screens) |
| Where your data lives | Your machine / your server | Content & schedules in their cloud |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited use | Per-screen billing from screen 2; player app/Pi image required |
| Works offline | Yes | Players cache locally |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Who should stay with Yodeck
Stay with Yodeck if you have exactly one screen (free beats $49), if you want turnkey preloaded hardware shipped to your door, or if the app ecosystem — live news, weather, dashboards — is content you actually display. Signboard shows images, videos, web pages and templated announcement slides; it does not have an app store.
Switch the moment screen count matters: Signboard is $49 once for unlimited screens, with drag-reorder playlists, server-side dayparting evaluated in each screen's own timezone (kiosk clocks drift and lie), a live health dashboard, offline media caching via service worker, and one-click emergency takeover to every screen you own.
Making the switch
Step 1 — Buy once on Whop. One-time $49 for the packaged Windows installer plus a guided VPS deploy — lifetime updates, unlimited screens.
Step 2 — Open /player on each screen. Any TV browser, Pi or tablet shows a 6-character pairing code. Type it into the dashboard, name the screen, assign a playlist. No app installs, no per-device accounts.
Step 3 — Build playlists and schedules. Upload media, drag to reorder, set daypart rules per screen — edits push to players instantly over WebSocket.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/signboard. The $49 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.
The bottom line
Subscriptions make sense when a service does ongoing work for you — hosting, syncing, multi-region infrastructure, human labor. They make much less sense when the work happens on your own hardware and the monthly bill is just a toll booth. Signboard is our bet that for this job, most people are better served owning the tool: $49 once, on a single screen Signboard pays for itself vs Yodeck in about 6 months. On five screens, 5 weeks — then it's $0 a year, forever.
Signboard is part of OneTimeSuite — 56 desktop and self-hosted apps built on the same principle: your hardware does the work, so you should not pay rent on it. Every app is a one-time purchase with MIT-licensed source on GitHub, no accounts and no telemetry. Want everything at once? OneTimeSuite Complete bundles the whole suite for a single flat $997.
Try Signboard — $49, one time
Signed installer on Whop, or build it free from the MIT source. Your call.
Browse the whole pay-once suite or all comparisons.