Pricing
What Does a Conference Room
Display Actually Cost in 2026?
Real numbers: dedicated panels cost $500–$2,000 per room plus $15–30/month. iPad-based displays cost $175–$425 once. Five-year comparison inside.
Short answer: a dedicated room scheduling panel costs $500–$2,000 per room in hardware plus $15–$30/month per room in software, forever. An iPad-based display costs $175–$425 per room, once — and $76–$325 if you already own the iPads. Over five years, that's roughly a 5–10× difference.
Vendors don't love publishing total cost of ownership, so let's do it for them.
The dedicated-panel route
A typical enterprise deployment per room:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Scheduling panel (Crestron, Logitech Tap, Joan 6", etc.) | $500–$2,000 |
| PoE injector / power install | $50–$150 |
| Software subscription | $15–$30 / month |
| Year-one total per room | $730–$2,510 |
| Five-year total per room | $1,450–$3,950 |
For a 10-room office, five years lands between $14,500 and $39,500. The subscription alone — the part that never ends — runs $1,800–$3,600 per room per decade.
The iPad route
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Used iPad (skip if you own one) | $100–$180 |
| Locking wall mount | $60–$120 |
| Cable + raceway | $15–$25 |
| The Room Display app | $99 one-time |
| Total per room | $175–$425 |
| Five-year total per room | $175–$425 |
Ten rooms, five years: $1,750–$4,250 total. No renewal conversation with procurement, ever.
"But dedicated panels must be better, right?"
Sometimes. Be honest about what you're paying for:
Dedicated panels win on: PoE-native hardware, occupancy sensors, utilization analytics dashboards, status LED bars visible down a corridor, and vendor SLAs. If you're managing 200 rooms across continents, that's worth real money.
iPads win on: cost (obviously), hardware you already understand, instant replacement (any iPad in a drawer is a spare), a better touchscreen than most panels, and no vendor lock-in — if the software disappoints, the hardware is still an iPad.
For offices with 2–20 rooms, the analytics dashboards mostly go unopened and the sensors mostly confirm what everyone already knows about Room 3. You're paying enterprise prices for SMB problems.
The hidden costs people forget
- Panel installs often need an electrician (PoE drops) — $100–$250/room
- Subscription price increases. SaaS pricing only moves one direction
- Per-user fees. Some platforms charge by employee count, not room count — costs grow as you hire
- Decommissioning. A proprietary panel is e-waste; an iPad has resale value
FAQ
What's the cheapest possible room display? A retired company iPad + a $25 cradle + a $99 one-time app: $124 per room.
Is there a free meeting room display app? Free tiers exist but typically push subscriptions, lack Microsoft 365/Google service-account auth, or cap features. Run the five-year math, not the month-one math.
Do iPad displays work offline? They need Wi-Fi to sync calendars — same as every panel on the market.
About to get a quote for dedicated panels? Forward this to whoever signs the purchase order first.