Free menu boards
Build the board with no sign-up, keep the file, and run one TV free for ever. The conditions are on this page rather than three clicks away, including the ones that mean you should buy something else.
No card · no installer · nothing to sideload on the TV
Free digital menu board software means two separate things, and they are worth pulling apart. ChannelOS gives you both. The menu board maker runs in a browser with no account, no email and no card, and downloads the finished board as a 1920x1080 PNG you own. The free plan then runs one paired TV screen for ever, with no watermark on the glass and no trial clock, so a price you change on your phone changes on the wall. What free does not cover is a second screen, boards that swap themselves at breakfast and dinner, live takeover and one-tap background removal. Those start at 499 rupees per screen per month.
Boards from three kinds of counter, drawn by the same renderer a paired TV runs. These are our own presets, not customer photographs.
Cafe & coffee · Third Shift Coffee
Bakery · Proofbox Bakehouse
Bar & pub · The Crown & Anchor
These are our own sample venues, not customers. We have not put words in anyone's mouth: the boards are real product output, the businesses are made up, and we will say so until there are real ones here to name. Type your own menu and watch this happen →
People run ChannelOS screens in cafés and restaurants, gyms and studios, clinics and waiting rooms, schools and colleges, events, hotels and shops. One TV or one standee is enough to start.
The boundary
Making the board is free with no account at all, and running one board on one TV is free for ever with no card. Everything that is not free is in the same table, on the same page, because a free claim with its conditions hidden on another page is not a free claim. Full plan detail sits on the pricing page.
| What you want to do | On the free plan | If it is not free, where it starts |
|---|---|---|
| Build a menu board and download it as a picture | Free, and no account, email or card is asked for | Never costs anything |
| Put one board on one TV and keep it there | Free for ever. One screen, one seat, no trial clock | Never costs anything |
| Change a price after the board is already on the wall | Free, on that screen, from your phone | Never costs anything |
| A vendor watermark or logo on the glass | There is none, on any plan | Not applicable |
| Take your work out as a portable file | Export is free on every plan, including this one | Not applicable |
| AI drafting the board from a sentence or a PDF | 50 AI credits a month on free | 150 a month on Solo, 400 on Pro |
| A second TV | Not free. The free screen stays free, and the next one is billed | 499 rupees per screen per month, or 399 per screen per month paid yearly |
| Breakfast, lunch and dinner swapping themselves on a timer | Not on free. Channels and dayparting are the scheduling layer | Solo |
| A live takeover: one message over the top of everything | Not on free | Solo |
| One-tap background removal for a clean plated shot | Not on free | Solo |
| A brand kit that locks your fonts and colours | Not on free | Pro |
| Prices pulled automatically out of your till | Not built, on any plan | Buy a POS-integrated product instead |
Billing is in Indian rupees and it is per screen, never per shop or per site. The first screen does not convert to paid when you add others beside it, and if you stop paying, the paid screens stop at the end of the period you already paid for while the free one keeps running. Nothing is deleted, and an export is free on every plan.
The download question
No, and that is a feature rather than a missing file. There is no installer, no APK to sideload and no media player box: the maker runs in a browser tab, and the TV runs the board in the browser already built into the set. The only thing you can download is the board itself, as a picture.
The maker exports a 1920x1080 PNG, free and without an account. It is a plain image file: print it, put it on a USB stick, post it, hand it to a signwriter. What an image cannot do is correct itself, so the day the paneer price moves you make a new one and put the new one wherever the old one went.
A screen that opens a modern web page: Android TV, Google TV, webOS, Fire TV, a Chromebox, or a laptop in kiosk mode on the HDMI port. You open the player address on the TV, it shows a six character code, and you scan that from your phone. A set from around 2012 may not carry a browser new enough, and that is worth checking first.
A screen that is already playing keeps playing if the wifi drops, but it needs the connection back to come up again after a power cut, because nothing is cached on the television itself. If a screen has to survive a long outage entirely on its own, buy a player from a company that sells one and ask them about local storage. That is a real reason to pay for hardware. Ours is not one of them.
Start here
Start from the kitchen you actually run: each of the fourteen styles below opens the free menu board maker with a real starter menu, its own palette and its own layout, so a sushi board never arrives looking like a barbecue board.
The ones people open most are the pizzeria board, which gives every size its own column so a 9-inch price cannot be read as a 12-inch one, the cafe board and the bakery board for a counter people read while queuing, the Indian board with veg and non-veg kept clearly apart, and the bar and pub board for a drinks list that changes on a Friday.
If you would rather read the whole path before touching anything, the walkthrough of getting a menu board onto a restaurant TV covers it start to finish, and digital menu boards explains what the category is before the word free is attached to it.
Say the quiet part
Four kinds of kitchen, and for three of them the answer is to buy a different product rather than a bigger plan here. We would rather you read this now than find it out on a Friday evening with a screen already on the wall.
There is no POS integration here and none in the product today. Nothing connects to Toast, Square, Clover or any billing software, so a price changed at the counter stays wrong on the wall until somebody changes it there too. If automatic sync is the requirement, buy a hospitality signage product that sells that integration and hold them to it.
Scheduling is the paid line, and it is the honest reason most kitchens stop being free. Channels, dayparting by hour and weekday, and live takeover all start on Solo. Building three boards is free, and having the TV swap them at eleven o'clock on its own is not.
Then look at the open-source side rather than at us. A self-hosted Xibo CMS or Anthias charges no licence fee for any number of screens. You supply and maintain the server, or a small computer per screen, and you still need something else to design the boards, because neither draws artwork. That is a real trade and for a technical operator it is often the better one.
We do not produce a play-proof report or an audited log you can invoice against, so a screen that has to bill third-party advertisers by verified impression is not a job for this. Signage vendors who sell ad networks build that reporting, and it is what you are paying them for.
One thing we will not do is tell you what a screen will do to your takings. We have no figure for that which would survive being checked, so we do not publish one. What is checkable is the mechanism: the board on the wall says what you last typed, and you typed it from your phone.
The ones asked at the counter rather than at the desk, about sold-out dishes, burn-in, power cuts and who sets it up, are on the answers page, and the same free-versus-paid line drawn across the whole product is on free digital signage software.
Make it in the browser with no sign-up, and if you like it, open the player on the TV and scan the code. First screen free for ever.
Sell it instead of buying it. The ChannelOS partner program pays 20% of what each business you refer pays us for their first 12 months, then 10% for as long as they stay. Free to join, nothing to stock.
See the partner program →