UniKioskBuying · Comparison
The real cost of ten screens over three years
Hardware, software, connectivity, mounting and attention — the whole bill, with the parts that never make it onto a comparison page.
Signage is sold on a per-screen monthly, so that is the number everyone compares. It is rarely the biggest line.
Here is a full three-year cost for a ten-screen estate at one site, with realistic figures. Substitute your own; the point is the shape.
Hardware
| Item | Unit | Ten screens |
|---|---|---|
| Display (commercial-ish 43") | £320 | £3,200 |
| Player device (mid-range Android box) | £60 | £600 |
| Mount | £45 | £450 |
| Enclosure, where public-facing | £70 | £280 |
| Cabling and installation labour | £90 | £900 |
| Subtotal | £5,430 |
Note that the player is about one per cent of it. Arguments about £30 versus £60 devices are noise next to the mounting labour.
Software, three years
| Product | Per screen / month | Ten screens, 3 years |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cloud plan | £8 | £2,880 |
| Mid-tier cloud plan | £16 | £5,760 |
| Self-hosted open source | £0 licence | Server + maintenance |
| Device-local, no cloud | £0 | £0 |
At the mid tier, three years of software costs about the same as all the hardware. That is the line worth staring at before signing.
Connectivity
The one nobody quotes. If every screen is on existing Wi-Fi, this is zero. If two of them are in a basement, a marquee or an outbuilding:
- Network run: £150–£600 each, one-off.
- Or 4G router plus SIM: £12–£25 per month, per site, forever.
Two awkward locations can cost more over three years than the software.
Attention
The largest hidden cost and the hardest to quote. Somebody has to change content, notice when a screen is stale, and go out when one is blank.
Budget an hour a month per site for content and four call-outs over three years. At any reasonable internal rate that is comfortably four figures, and it is spent regardless of which product you buy.
What changes it is not the dashboard. It is whether the screens recover from power cuts on their own, and whether the person who updates content can do it from a phone in under a minute.
Three-year totals
| Cloud, mid-tier | Cloud, entry | No-cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware | £5,430 | £5,430 | £5,430 |
| Software | £5,760 | £2,880 | £0 |
| Connectivity (2 awkward sites) | £900 | £900 | £0 |
| Total | £12,090 | £9,210 | £5,430 |
The no-cloud column also drops connectivity, because screens that do not need a connection do not need one bought for them.
When the cloud column is worth it
Genuinely, often:
- More than one site, and somebody at head office needs to push a change everywhere.
- Advertising sold on the screens, needing proof-of-play.
- Dayparting — different boards at different hours, automatically.
- A procurement process that requires a vendor with an SLA.
If two or more of those are true, the £5,760 is buying something real, and managing ten screens by hand will cost more than that in attention.
When it is not
- One site.
- Content that changes weekly, not hourly.
- Nobody who will ever open a dashboard.
- Screens in places with poor connectivity.
That is a large share of the market, and it is the case we built UniKiosk for. The comparison pages say plainly where the other products are the better answer.