Digital Signage With No Monthly Fee

Most digital signage software is sold the way a phone contract is sold: a small number per screen per month, charged for as long as the screen stays on the wall. easyCMS is sold the other way round. You buy a licence once, you keep it, and no renewal date goes in the calendar. This page is the arithmetic behind that claim, including the parts of it that do not flatter us.

What “no monthly fee” actually means, and what it does not

Three of the four easyCMS plans are genuinely one-time. The easyCMS account is 49€ paid once. An extra display licence is 99€ paid once. The PRO account is 299€ paid once. Nothing renews, nothing lapses, and the screens do not stop when a card expires.

The fourth plan is not one-time, and we would rather you read that here than find it at the quote stage. The Enterprise account is 1,290€ per year. It is the only recurring line we sell. It exists because what it provides, more than 25 displays, full white label on your own domain, multiple users with roles and permissions, 20GB of storage and priority support, carries an ongoing cost to us. If a page tells you a platform has absolutely no recurring option anywhere in its price list, check the enterprise tier before you believe it.

Two more things “no monthly fee” does not mean. It does not mean free: there is no free plan and no free trial of easyCMS, and if that rules us out for you, it rules us out. And it does not mean unlimited: storage is capped per plan, and each screen needs its own licence. Both are covered further down.

Good to know The CMS itself is hosted by us in the European Union, at Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany. The one-time price includes that hosting for the lifetime of the product, which is the part people expect to find a monthly charge attached to.

The five-year arithmetic

Below is what the software costs over five years at three sizes, using each vendor’s own published price. Everything here was checked September 2026 and will drift, so treat it as a method rather than a quote.

Prices appear in the currency each vendor publishes. We do not convert them, because an exchange rate we pick today would quietly flatter whichever side we wanted it to.

easyCMS at each size, buying the account and the licences in one order: one screen is the 49€ account. Five screens is the 49€ account plus four licences at 66€, which is 313€. Twenty-five screens is the 299€ PRO account plus 24 licences at 66€, which is 1,883€.

Three rows in that table deserve to be read properly rather than skimmed past.

Yodeck’s free tier is real. One screen, forever, with unlimited storage. If you have exactly one screen and no plan to add a second, that is a better financial answer than 49€, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

OptiSigns’ free tier is also real, up to three screens, with two conditions that matter in a customer-facing space: the OptiSigns logo appears on your screen, and support is community only. In a stockroom that is nothing. Above a shop counter it is somebody else’s brand on your wall.

Rise Vision’s per-school plan beats us at density. At 1,399 USD per school per year for unlimited displays, the cost per screen falls the more screens you hang in one building. At 25 screens easyCMS PRO is still ahead over five years, 1,883€ paid once against 6,995 USD. Past 25 displays in a single building you would need our Enterprise account at 1,290€ a year, and from there the answer depends on what the screens run. Assuming Android players, which is what most schools buy from us, each display carries a 49€ licence: 40 Android displays over five years is 6,450€ of annual fees plus 1,960€ of licences, or 8,410€, and even treating a dollar and a euro as equal Rise Vision’s 6,995 USD comes out ahead of that. Windows and Linux displays carry no licence charge on Enterprise at all, so the same building fitted with existing Windows machines is 6,450€ over five years however many screens you hang, which is the cheaper route and lands under Rise Vision. If you are a school putting 40 or 100 Android screens in one building, go and look at them. Our schools page covers the sizes where we do win.

Good to know Every easyCMS figure in the table above is the one-order price, because that is what a buyer fitting out a network now actually pays: licences bought in the same order as an account are a third off, 66€ each instead of 99€, applied at checkout as a Stripe coupon with no code to enter. Add screens later and each extra licence is 99€, which makes the same five-screen network 445€ and the same twenty-five on PRO 2,675€. That is the honest ceiling, and it is the only way these numbers go up.

Break-even, not percentages

Percentage savings are close to meaningless, because the percentage depends entirely on how many years you choose to count. The number that decides a purchase is how many months it takes for a one-time price to become the cheaper option.

Measured against two mainstream paid subscriptions in the table above, at 7.50 EUR and 8 EUR per screen per month, with easyCMS bought as one order:

Add those screens later and each licence is 99 EUR, which is 12 to 13 months on its own, and the same 25-screen network at list is 2,675 EUR, or 13 to 14 months.

What you are buying is a line that goes flat. A 25-screen build is 1,883€ paid once, and then the software costs nothing again. Against OptiSigns Standard’s annual price of 7.50€ per screen per month, the same 25 screens cost 2,250€ every year: 6,750€ by the end of year three and 11,250€ by the end of year five, against 1,883€ that has not moved, a difference of 9,367€. Against Yodeck Basic at 8€ it is 12,000€ over five years, a difference of 10,117€. The purchase has paid for itself in about ten months, and the average works out at 2.09€ per screen per month by the end of year three and 1.26€ by the end of year five, while the subscription line stays where it started and then keeps going.

Now the part we would leave out if this page were marketing rather than arithmetic. The cheapest euro-priced subscription in that table still beats us in the early years. Xibo Cloud Professional at 4,40€ per display per month is 1,320€ a year for 25 displays, so year one costs 1,320€ against our 1,883€, and easyCMS does not pull ahead until about month seventeen. You also pay the whole 1,883€ in January rather than spread across the year, which is a cash-flow question a break-even table cannot answer for you. If you add those screens later rather than in one order, the figure is 2,675€ and the crossover moves out to about month twenty-four.

Watch out If your screens are going up for a six-month campaign, a pop-up shop or a trade show season, the break-even table above says buy a subscription. Do that. We would rather lose the sale than sell you a lifetime licence you use for one quarter.

Our cost per screen guide shows the same working with hardware, installation and electricity included, which is where the software line stops being the biggest number on the page.

A costed example, with real prices

A five-screen independent retailer: two window screens, one behind the till, two above the fixtures.

Added later those four licences are 99 EUR each, so the same five-screen network is 445€ at list. Either way there is no year two line, because there is no year two invoice. If you also want the hardware from us, an easyCMS Android player is 499€ and arrives pre-configured; like any Android display it still needs its own display licence, which is a separate line.

Support is not a line item unless you want it to be. The assistant, the guides and the FAQ are free to everyone with no account. An Expert Support Hour is 25€ when you want an engineer on your own setup, and Enterprise includes priority support. An expert support hour is 25€ if you want hands-on investigation, and it is refunded in full if the root cause turns out to be a bug in easyCMS. Full list prices are on the pricing page.

When a subscription is genuinely the better buy

This is not a strawman section. There are real situations where a monthly platform is the right purchase and easyCMS is not.

• Under six months of use. A pilot, a seasonal shop, an exhibition stand, a building you are leaving. Below the break-even line a subscription wins on the maths and you can stop paying when you stop needing it.
• A pilot you might abandon. If there is a genuine chance the project dies at review, a cancellable monthly fee is worth more than a lower total. Buy the option to walk away.
• One screen where a free tier does the job. Yodeck gives you one screen free forever. If that is your whole estate and you are content on a free tier’s support, take it.
• You need SSO or SAML. easyCMS has no single sign-on and no SAML. If your IT policy requires identity federation, we fail the requirement and no amount of pricing fixes that.
• You need a large app or integration marketplace. There is no app marketplace, no integration directory and no public API portal here. If your content plan depends on dozens of third-party connectors, buy a platform built around them.
• You need unlimited video storage. Our caps are 1GB, 5GB and 20GB. Yodeck’s free tier alone offers unlimited storage. A heavy video library will hit our ceiling.
• 100-plus Android screens in one building. Rise Vision’s per-school unlimited plan is built exactly for that shape, and it wins there: 100 Android displays on our Enterprise account is 1,290€ a year plus a 49€ licence each, or 11,350€ over five years against their 6,995 USD. If those screens run Windows or Linux, where Enterprise charges nothing per display, five years is 6,450€ whatever the count and the comparison swings back to us.

What the one-time price does not include

Storage. 1GB on the account, 5GB on PRO, 20GB on Enterprise. In plain terms, a 30-second 1080p video encoded at a normal signage bitrate of around 5 Mbit/s is roughly 20MB, and a full-screen 1920 × 1080 JPEG is often around 0.5MB.

Those are estimates and your encoder settings will move them either way. The practical point is that a menu board or an office noticeboard almost never troubles 1GB, while a rolling library of brand films that nobody ever deletes will. Re-encode before uploading and delete what is no longer scheduled. See storage quota and media uploads.

Hardware. Screens, mounts and players are separate. An easyCMS Android player is 499€. You can also run the free Windows player on a machine you already own, or use a screen with LG webOS or Samsung Tizen built in and skip the external box entirely. Android, webOS and Tizen use a commercial per-display player licence, which we supply. The players page covers the options.

A licence per screen. One display licence per screen. After the first it is 99€ at list, or 66€ each when the licences go through checkout in the same order as the account. On Enterprise the price depends on the platform: Android, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen displays are 49€ each, because those players carry a commercial licence we buy in, while Windows and Linux displays carry no licence charge at all. Two screens showing two halves of one menu board are still two licences.

Enterprise. The one recurring line, 1,290€ per year, as set out at the top of this page.

What “lifetime” means precisely

Vendors use “lifetime” loosely, so here is our definition in full. A lifetime licence lasts for the lifetime of the product, and it covers three things:

1. Access to the cloud CMS we host in the EU, with no renewal fee.
2. The player software for the displays your licences cover.
3. Free software updates as the product moves forward.

It does not cover hardware, which has its own manufacturer warranty, and it does not entitle you to a different product if we ever build one. It is not a perpetual on-premise binary you install on your own server either: easyCMS is a hosted service and the hosting is what your one-time fee keeps paying for.

What happens if easyCMS goes away

This is the question every one-time vendor gets asked and most avoid. We can answer it because of a decision made long before pricing.

easyCMS is built on the open-source Xibo 4.5 engine, published under the AGPLv3 licence. We say so on this site and in the footer, because it is a credibility asset rather than something to bury. The consequence for you is concrete: the engine your content runs on is not our private property. It is open source, it is maintained by a community beyond us, and anyone can host it. Your layouts, playlists, media and datasets are your content, exportable, and not locked in a format only we can read.

Compare that with the position a subscription customer holds. On a proprietary platform you are not buying software, you are buying a right of access to somebody else’s cloud, for as long as you keep paying and as long as they keep operating. If that vendor is acquired, changes its pricing, or closes, the right of access ends and there is no underlying engine you can take elsewhere.

We are a real company with a real history behind that answer: DynamicDigital sp. z o.o., registered in Warsaw, Poland, EU VAT PL5213678094, trading in digital signage since 2014, with easyCMS launched in 2016. If you would rather run the same engine on your own terms, our managed Xibo hosting page explains that route, and Xibo’s own cloud starts at 4,40€ per display per month, checked September 2026, if you prefer a subscription from the source.

What we cannot do

An honest pricing page has to name its own gaps, so here they are in one place. easyCMS has no free plan and no free trial. There is no single sign-on or SAML, no app or integration marketplace, no public API portal, no native mobile app and no templates gallery. There is no charts widget and no Twitter or X widget, since Xibo 4.x removed it and Mastodon takes its place. We hold no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification and we will not claim one. Proof-of-play reporting starts at PRO, users and permissions are Enterprise only, and synchronised video walls are Android only. Support is answered within two to three working days rather than instantly, and it runs Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 CET.

If any of those is a hard requirement, the honest answer is that a subscription platform will serve you better, and the break-even table will not change that.

Questions buyers ask

Is there really no monthly fee?

On the 49€ account, the 99€ licence and the 299€ PRO account, yes. You pay once. The Enterprise account at 1,290€ a year is the single exception and it is billed annually.

Is there a free plan or a free trial?

No, neither. Free of charge and open to everyone, without an account, you get the AI assistant on this site, 25 written support guides and the FAQ. The software itself starts at 49€.

What happens if I stop paying?

On the one-time plans there is nothing to stop paying. Your licences do not expire and your screens do not go dark on a billing date.

Which plan do I need?

Up to five displays, the 49€ account with extra licences at 99€ each, or 66€ each when you buy them in the same order as the account. Six to 25 displays, the 299€ PRO account, which also brings proof-of-play reporting and 5GB of storage. More than 25 displays, or white label on your own domain, or multiple users with roles, means the Enterprise account at 1,290€ a year. The pricing page lists all of it side by side.

Do I pay for updates?

No. Free software updates are included for as long as you have the account.

Is my content locked in?

No. The engine is open-source Xibo under AGPLv3, and your layouts, media and datasets are yours and exportable.

Can I use screens and players I already own?

Usually. Most screens with an HDMI input will work with a player, though a consumer TV is not a signage panel and is not built for all-day duty, and the Windows player is free software, so an existing mini PC can run a display. Each screen still needs its own display licence.

Why is easyCMS more expensive than a subscription in year one?

Because you are buying the whole five years in the first month. At 25 screens bought in one order that is 1,883€, or about 6.28€ per screen per month across year one, which is already under OptiSigns Standard’s 7.50€ annual price but above Xibo Cloud Professional at 4,40€ per display per month. It falls to 3.14€ by the end of year two and 1.26€ by the end of year five, while the subscription stays flat.

Working out your own number

Take your screen count, put your current or quoted subscription rate next to it, and divide the one-time easyCMS price by the monthly total. That is your break-even in months. If the answer is longer than you expect to keep the screens running, buy the subscription with our blessing. If it is shorter, tell us how many screens you have and roughly where they are going, and we will send a firm figure with a VAT invoice for your finance team.

Email info@myeasycms.com, call +48 509 937 137, or use the support request form. The pricing page has every list price, the features page has what the software actually does, and free digital signage software explains the open-source engine underneath it.