So funktioniert die easyCMS -Lizenz: Eine Zahlung, ein Bildschirm, für immer

An easyCMS licence is the right to run one display. Your 49€ account includes the first licence, so one screen costs 49€ in total and nothing after that. Every screen after the first is a display licence bought once: 66€ each when the licences go through checkout in the same order as the account, 99€ each if you add them later. Either way it stays on your account for as long as you use it.

This page used to promise a free licence. It should not have, and the section on the word “free” further down explains what that name actually referred to. Here is how licensing really works, in full.

What a licence is

A licence is permission to run one display against the CMS. It is not a user seat, not a site licence and not a subscription. One authorised screen uses one licence, and that is the whole counting rule.

Two things follow from that, and both save money.

Unauthorised players cost nothing. A player you have installed but not yet authorised registers itself in the CMS and then sits there, inert. It downloads nothing, shows nothing and consumes no licence. You can install players ahead of a rollout without paying for the ones that are not live yet.

Screen count is your bill. There is no per-user charge on the standard plans, no charge per channel, no charge per playlist and nothing that scales with how much content you push. Count the screens on the wall and you have the number.

What a screen actually costs

The third off the extra licences is a discount applied automatically at checkout when the account and the licences are in the same order. There is no code to enter. Worked through for the sizes people actually buy, bought in one order:

Added later the licences are 99€ each, which is the honest ceiling on those figures: the same networks come to 148€ for two screens, 445€ for five, 1,190€ for ten and 2,675€ for twenty-five. Nothing stops you buying that way, it just costs more per screen.

Above 25 screens the arithmetic changes shape, because Enterprise is a yearly fee rather than a one-time one. That is covered below, and the full five-year comparison against monthly platforms is in digital signage cost per screen.

The word “free” in the old product name

The account product has carried the word “free” in its name and its URL for years, and it has confused people ever since. It refers to the display licence bundled with the account: buy the account for 49€ and the first licence is included at no extra charge. It does not mean there is a free plan.

To be blunt about it, because the old version of this article was not: there is no free easyCMS plan and no free trial. The cheapest way in is 49€ once.

If free is genuinely what you need, other vendors have it and we would rather tell you than waste your afternoon. Checked September 2026, Yodeck’s free tier covers one screen forever with unlimited storage, and OptiSigns covers up to three screens free, with the OptiSigns logo shown on screen and community support only. For a single screen you are testing an idea on, those are real options. We wrote about the trade-offs in free digital signage software.

What is free with easyCMS is the answers. The AI assistant on this site, the 25 written guides at /support/ and the FAQ are free to everyone, with no account and no ticket, and between them they cover almost everything people ask us.

What lifetime covers, and what it does not

“Lifetime” is a word that can mean almost nothing, so here is the boundary drawn plainly.

Two points on that table.

Storage is set by your tier: 1GB on the standard account, 5GB on PRO, 20GB on Enterprise. If you outgrow your allowance, you can move tier or ask us to quote extra storage, which we price case by case rather than from a list. There is more on what that actually holds in storage quota and media uploads.

Proof-of-play reporting is a PRO and Enterprise feature. It is not part of the standard 49€ account, and no licence purchase adds it.

A licence belongs to a display, not to a person or a place

This is the part that saves arguments later. A licence is attached to your account and consumed by an authorised display. It is not tied to an individual, to an email address, to a building or to a country.

So moving a screen from your Warsaw office to your Kraków office changes nothing. Handing the CMS over to a new marketing manager changes nothing. Replacing the panel while keeping the same player changes nothing. The licence count only moves when the number of authorised displays moves.

The one thing that does relate to people is user accounts, and that sits on a different axis entirely: multiple users with roles and permissions is an Enterprise feature. On the standard and PRO accounts everyone shares one login. See users and permissions.

Two different things are called a licence

Most confused licence emails we receive come from mixing these two up.

The easyCMS display licence is what you buy from us, at 66€ in the same order as the account or 99€ on its own later. It adds one display to your account.

The commercial player licence is a separate thing carried by the player software on some platforms. easyCMS supplies it, so there is nothing extra to buy, but it is worth knowing it exists.

The player software for Windows is free of charge, and so is the Linux build. The practical effect is that a Windows mini-PC needs only your easyCMS display licence, while an Android box or a webOS panel carries a player licence as well. Both are covered by what you have paid. There is a fuller comparison of the platforms in players for easyCMS and in Tizen vs webOS vs Android.

Watch out LG webOS Signage means the commercial signage models, not a consumer LG television that happens to run webOS. Consumer sets are not supported, and the difference is invisible on a spec sheet in a shop. Check the model against easyCMS support for LG webOS before you buy.

How a licence gets assigned to a screen

Nothing is allocated when you buy. Licences land on your account as soon as the order completes, and one is taken up at the moment a display is authorised.

The sequence looks like this:

1. Install the player and point it at the CMS with the address and key from your welcome email. Installers are at /download/.
2. The player registers itself and reports that it is waiting. This is correct behaviour, not a fault. It is using nothing at this point.
3. Open Add a display on a phone or laptop that is on the same internet connection as the screen, sign in, name the display and connect it.
4. The screen starts at the player’s next check-in.

That same-connection requirement is the step people trip over, usually by standing in front of the screen with a phone on mobile data. Use the venue’s own network. The full walkthrough is in adding a new display, and if this is your very first screen, start with connecting your first display instead.

When a player dies

Hardware fails. The licence does not die with it.

Email info@myeasycms.com or use the support request form, tell us which screen is retired, and we release its licence so it can be used on the replacement. Do the same when you decommission a site rather than replace it, because a licence you are not using is worth reclaiming. The step-by-step, including what to do with the old display record rather than deleting it, is in display licences and authorisation.

Tip Name displays by location the moment you claim them. “Reception, ground floor” beats “android-8842f1” the first time you have to work out which of forty screens has gone quiet.

Enterprise: the one plan that renews

Above 25 displays the model changes, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Enterprise is 1290€ per year. It is a subscription.

What it changes about licensing:

The split by platform is new, and it is worth understanding why it exists. On Enterprise, licences drop from 99€ to 49€ each.

That decides where the annual fee pays for itself. On Android, webOS or Tizen you save 50€ a display against a 99€ licence bought later, so 1290 ÷ 50 is 25.8 and the fee covers itself on licence savings alone at 26 displays. On Windows or Linux you save the whole 99€, so it covers itself at 14 displays. If you have a free choice of platform, the Windows route is the cheaper one. Each Android player is also 200€ less at 299€ instead of 499€.

The argument for it is that 1290€ covers the whole estate rather than scaling with every screen, and that licences drop to 49€ or to nothing depending on the platform. The argument against it is that it renews, so if a flat one-time cost is the whole reason you are here, the honest answer is that Enterprise does not give you that. White labelling is the other reason people move.

When paying once is the wrong call

Start with what you get back, because that is the reason to buy at all. The cheapest paid tiers on the big subscription platforms sit at around 8€ per screen per month, checked September 2026. Five screens bought from us in one order is 313€ and then the line goes flat. The same five screens rented are 480€ a year: 1,440€ by the end of year three and 2,400€ by the end of year five, and still billing. Ten screens on PRO is 893€ once against 4,800€ over five years. Break-even is about eight months on five screens and about eleven on ten. Added later the licences are 99€ each, so the same networks are 445€ and 1,190€, and break-even moves to about eleven and about fifteen months.

Buying outright still costs more on day one. That is arithmetic, not modesty. Against a typical monthly platform, break-even is roughly six months for a first screen, about eight months for each additional screen bought in the same order, about twelve months if you add it later, and about nine to ten months for a 25-screen PRO build at 1,883€ against 200€ a month. Below those break-even points, rent instead.

There is one case where a competitor simply wins on price and it is worth naming. Rise Vision’s $1,399 per school per year for unlimited displays, checked September 2026, beats us outright when you are putting a large number of screens into a single building. If that is your situation, do the sum honestly before you buy from us.

For everything permanent, the direction of travel is the other way, and digital signage with no monthly fee works through the comparison in detail.

Die Kurzfassung

One display, one licence, one payment. The 49€ account includes your first licence, extra screens are 66€ each in the same order and 99€ each later, and the licence belongs to a display rather than to a person or a place. Lifetime covers the hosted CMS, the player software for your licensed screens and free updates. It does not cover hardware, and it does not cover Enterprise, which is a yearly plan. There is no free tier, and the word “free” in the old product name only ever meant the licence included in the account price.

Related reading: digital signage cost per screen, pricing and display licences and authorisation.