Digital Signage Cost Per Screen: Subscription vs Lifetime

Most digital signage quotes hide the real number. You get a price per screen per month for the software and nothing else, which is roughly a third of what you will actually spend. This article puts the whole cost on the table, does the five-year arithmetic for 1, 10 and 50 screens, and shows where a subscription genuinely beats a one-time licence.

Every figure for easyCMS is our own published price. Every competitor figure was fetched from the vendor’s live pricing page on 30 August 2026 and is quoted as printed.

What you actually pay for

Six things, in rough order of how often people forget them.

Software (the CMS). The bit everyone quotes. Either a per-screen subscription or a one-time licence. It is usually the smallest line item over five years and the only one anyone negotiates.

The player. A small computer that drives the screen. An Android box, a Windows mini-PC, or a chip built into the display itself. Budget €150 to €500 per screen depending on what you pick. Our own Android player is €499 with a licence included and arrives pre-configured.

The display. A commercial panel rated for long duty cycles costs meaningfully more than a consumer TV of the same size, and it is worth it. A 55-inch commercial display sits somewhere between €700 and €1,500. This is normally your largest single cost.

Mounting. A bracket is €40. A bracket, a floor stand, or a recessed enclosure with ventilation is €150 to €600. Portrait orientation and anything outdoors pushes this up sharply.

Installation. An electrician for a socket behind the screen, a network drop or a decent Wi-Fi access point, and someone on a ladder. €150 to €500 per screen is realistic, more if you need cabling through a listed building or a live retail floor.

Content time. The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet. Someone has to make the slides, shoot the video, update the menu prices and check it all still plays. Half a day a month at internal rates is a real number, and over five years it usually exceeds the software cost. Budget it honestly.

If you only take one thing from this list: the software is not the expensive part of a single screen. It becomes the expensive part when you have fifty screens and you are paying for it every month for five years.

How per-screen subscription pricing works in 2026

The standard model is a fixed monthly fee per screen, discounted if you pay annually, with features gated by tier. Here is what four well-known vendors were charging on 30 August 2026.

Competitor pricing checked 30 August 2026; verify before relying on it.

Three things to notice.

The spread is wide. The cheapest paid tier here is a third of the most expensive, and both are sold as “digital signage software”. You are partly paying for features and partly for how much hand-holding is bundled.

Free tiers are real and generous at the bottom end. Yodeck gives you one screen free, permanently. OptiSigns gives you three with their branding on screen. If you are testing an idea on one screen, start there, not with us. We wrote more about that in free digital signage software.

Several vendors bundle hardware with annual plans. Yodeck ships a player with an annual subscription and ScreenCloud offers a free device on annual billing. That is a genuine saving of €150 to €250 per screen up front, and it is one of the strongest arguments for the subscription model. Be fair to it when you build your own comparison.

The catch is that the meter never stops. A €10 per screen per month plan is €600 per screen over five years, and €30,000 across fifty screens. If your screens are still on the wall in year six, you are still paying.

How a lifetime licence works

You pay once for the right to run the software, and you keep running it.

Our pricing, for reference:

Two honest caveats before the maths.

Our Enterprise tier is €1,290 a year. It is a subscription. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Above 25 displays you are paying us annually, and the argument for easyCMS at that scale is that €1,290 covers the whole estate rather than scaling with every screen you add.

Free expert support is included with every account, at every tier, and the AI assistant and support guides are free to everyone. If you ever need someone hands-on with a specific problem, an expert hour is €25, bought only when you want it.

Five-year cost: 1 screen

Assumptions, stated plainly: 60 months. Software only, since the display, mount and installation are identical whichever CMS you choose. Subscription low band is €9 per screen per month, roughly the entry annual tier of the vendors above. Mid band is €15, roughly the mid tier. easyCMS figures assume you buy every licence separately at list price, which is the least flattering reading for us.

Break-even against the €9 band: €49 ÷ €9 = 5.4 months. Against the €15 band: 3.3 months.

At one screen the absolute numbers are small enough that the decision barely matters financially. €540 over five years is not what will make or break a single-screen project. Choose on whether you like the editor.

Five-year cost: 10 screens

Ten screens exceeds the 5-display ceiling on the standard account, so this needs a PRO account at €299 plus a licence per display.

easyCMS: €299 + (10 × €99) = €299 + €990 = €1,289, paid once.

Break-even against the €9 band: €1,289 ÷ €90 per month = 14.3 months. Against the €15 band: €1,289 ÷ €150 = 8.6 months.

So a ten-screen deployment pays for its lifetime licences somewhere between month nine and month fifteen. Everything after that is money you keep. Over five years the gap against the €9 band is €4,111, which buys three commercial displays.

Five-year cost: 50 screens

Fifty screens is above the 25-display PRO ceiling, so this is Enterprise: €1,290 per year, with licences at €49 rather than €99.

easyCMS year 1: €1,290 + (50 × €49) = €1,290 + €2,450 = €3,740. Each following year: €1,290. Five-year total: €3,740 + (4 × €1,290) = €8,900.

Break-even against the €9 band: easyCMS costs €3,740 in year one and nothing more until month 13. The subscription costs €450 a month. €3,740 ÷ €450 = 8.3 months. Against the €15 band, at €750 a month: €3,740 ÷ €750 = 5.0 months. After the crossover easyCMS stays ahead, because €1,290 a year works out at €107.50 a month against €450.

At this scale the difference is no longer academic. €18,100 over five years against the €9 band, €36,100 against the €15 band. That is a person, or twenty more screens.

The reason the gap opens so fast is structural, not clever pricing. Subscription cost scales linearly with screen count and time. Ours scales with screen count once, then flattens.

The break-even point, summarised

Across every size, a lifetime licence pays for itself inside 15 months and usually inside a year. If your screens will be on the wall for more than about eighteen months, the arithmetic favours buying. If they will not, it does not.

When a subscription is genuinely the better choice

We sell lifetime licences, so treat this section as the part where we argue against ourselves. There are four cases where a subscription wins outright.

Short deployments. A three-month pop-up, an exhibition stand, a conference, a seasonal retail activation. Twelve screens for one quarter on a €9 plan is €324. There is no version of buying licences that beats that. Rent it.

Pilots you might abandon. If you are not sure digital signage is right for you, a monthly plan is the cheapest way to find out, and the free tiers from Yodeck and OptiSigns are cheaper still. Prove the concept, then decide whether to buy. Spending €1,289 to discover nobody looks at the screen is a worse outcome than spending €108.

When you want to never think about it. A subscription bundles hosting, updates, storage growth and support into one recurring number that someone else worries about. Some vendors bundle the hardware too. If your alternative to paying monthly is a colleague spending an afternoon a quarter on the CMS, the subscription may be cheaper in real terms. This is a legitimate reason to pay more.

When procurement prefers opex. Large organisations often find a €600 annual line item easier to approve than a €1,289 capital purchase, even when the capital purchase is cheaper. Budget structure is a real constraint and there is no point fighting your own finance team over €300.

There is also a fairness point on features. The larger subscription platforms have things we do not: deeper native integrations, larger app marketplaces, more polished template libraries, and in some cases better analytics. If a specific integration is the reason the project exists, buy the platform that has it. Cost per screen is only the deciding factor when the shortlist can all do the job.

What “lifetime” has to include to be worth anything

“Lifetime licence” is a phrase that can mean almost nothing. A licence you cannot use is not an asset. Four things have to be true.

Updates are included. If security patches and new versions cost extra, you have bought a snapshot, not a licence. Ask whether updates are included for the life of the account or only for a support window.

Hosting is included, or you can self-host. Cloud signage needs a server somewhere. If the licence is one-time but the hosting is monthly, that is a subscription with extra steps. Ours includes hosted CMS access with the storage stated per tier.

Support is included. Not necessarily fast support, but support. Free expert support comes with every easyCMS account; €19 a year per licence upgrades it to same-day and phone.

The licence is portable. Hardware dies. You should be able to move a licence to a replacement player without buying it again.

Questions worth asking any vendor selling a lifetime licence:

• Whose lifetime is it, mine or the product’s? What happens if the product is discontinued?
• Are major version upgrades included, or only patches?
• Is there a storage limit, and what does exceeding it cost per year?
• Can I move a licence to new hardware, and how many times?
• What is the actual support commitment in writing?
• Is the underlying platform open source? If you disappear, can I keep running it?

That last one matters more than people realise. easyCMS is built on Xibo, a mature open-source signage engine that has been developed in the open for well over a decade. We say so openly because it is the honest answer to “what if you go away”. The engine is open source and will still exist. Proprietary platforms cannot make that promise.

Reducing cost per screen without cutting corners

Buy the display last and buy it commercial. A consumer TV saves €400 and fails in eighteen months of 12-hour days. There is more on this in our player buying guide.

Standardise on one player. Mixed hardware multiplies your support burden. Pick one and buy them all the same.

Do not over-specify the player. A €499 player driving a single Full HD menu board is overkill. Match the hardware to the content.

Design content once, reuse it everywhere. The recurring cost of signage is design time, not licences.

Check whether your screens even need to be online. Some deployments do fine on scheduled local playback, which removes network cost and a whole class of failure. See digital signage without internet.

FAQ

What is a realistic all-in cost per screen for the first year? Between €1,100 and €2,600 for a typical indoor installation: display €700 to €1,500, player €150 to €500, mount €40 to €600, installation €150 to €500, software €49 to €180. Software is 3% to 10% of it.

Is a one-time licence always cheaper? No. Below roughly a year of use, a subscription is cheaper. Above about fifteen months, a lifetime licence wins in every scenario we modelled.

Does the €49 easyCMS account really include a licence? Yes. €49 one-time gets you the account plus one display licence, 300MB of storage, and up to 5 displays on that tier. Extra licences are €99 each.

What happens at more than 25 displays? You move to Enterprise at €1,290 a year, which includes white labelling, your own domain, 10GB storage, licences at €49 and players at €169. It is an annual fee and we say so plainly.

Do I have to buy hardware from you? No. Licences work on any supported Windows, Android or LG webOS device you already own. Our €499 Android player exists because pre-configured hardware saves most people an afternoon, not because it is required.

Can I pay by invoice rather than card? Yes. Payments run through Stripe, which covers cards, PayPal, local EU methods and bank transfer, and you get a VAT invoice. We are DynamicDigital sp. z o.o. in Warsaw, Poland, VAT PL5213678094, so EU B2B customers can use reverse charge.

How do I check these numbers against my own situation? Take your screen count, multiply by your quoted monthly rate, multiply by 60, and compare it with the pricing page. If you want us to run it properly for your estate, email info@myeasycms.com or call +48 509 937 137.

The short version

Software is a small part of the cost of one screen and a large part of the cost of fifty. Subscriptions are the right answer for pilots, short deployments and teams who want a vendor to own the whole thing. Lifetime licences are the right answer for anything permanent, and the crossover arrives somewhere between month six and month fifteen.

Run the arithmetic for your own screen count before you sign anything. Sixty months is a long time to pay for the same software.