Pricing
Buy it once. Then it's yours.
Two plans, and a choice about how you pay for either. The one-time price is the one we'd rather you took: it's software you install on your own machine, and it should keep working whether or not we're still here to bill you.
Not open yet
You can't buy this today, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
There is no payment processor connected to this site and no company set up to take the money. Every button below records your email address and which plan you wanted, and then says so. When purchasing opens, the people who used those buttons are the first to hear — and the prices you can see are the prices we intend to charge.
The plans
Two products. Two ways to pay.
Personal
Your life
$19.99once. yours.
$3.99per month
The 26 spaces of the Personal lens. Everything you'd run a life out of.
- 26 spaces — turn off the ones you don't want
- Tasks, projects, notes, notebooks, daily journal
- Calendar, countdowns, reminders, routines with streaks
- Finances: budgets, subscriptions, savings goals, bank sync
- Canvases, gallery, maps, rankings, wins
- Insights across everything you keep
- Two-factor, encryption at rest, nightly backups
- The full data export, whenever you want it
- No invoicing, pipeline, jobs or stock
This is the price it will be. It cannot be bought yet — this records your address and which plan you wanted, and nothing else.
Personal + Business
Your life and your company
$39.99once. yours.
$9.99per month
All 37 spaces. Everything on the left, plus the eleven a business needs.
- All 37 spaces, both lenses
- Everything in Personal, unchanged
- Pipeline, quotes, invoices with PDFs and payment tracking
- Jobs with schedules, checklists, parts and photos
- Timesheets, billable and unbilled hours
- Inventory, purchasing, stock valuation
- Documents from fill-in templates
- A read-only client portal, reached by magic link
- Health and Operations — the vital signs on one screen
This is the price it will be. It cannot be bought yet — this records your address and which plan you wanted, and nothing else.
Both plans are the same install. The difference is which spaces you get, not which app you run — and moving from one to the other is a licence change, never a migration.
Side by side
What each one actually gets you.
The Business plan doesn't unlock a better version of the app. It adds eleven spaces to the same one.
| Personal | Personal + Business | |
|---|---|---|
| Spaces | 26 | 37 |
| Tasks, projects, notes, notebooks, journal | Yes | Yes |
| Calendar, countdowns, reminders | Yes | Yes |
| Routines with streaks | Yes | Yes |
| Finances, budgets, savings goals | Yes | Yes |
| Read-only bank sync | Yes | Yes |
| Canvases, gallery, maps, rankings | Yes | Yes |
| Insights across everything you keep | Yes | Yes |
| Publish a page to the open web | Yes | Yes |
| Two-factor, encryption at rest, security log | Yes | Yes |
| Nightly backups and the full export | Yes | Yes |
| Several accounts on one install | Yes | Yes |
| Pipeline, quotes, invoices | — | Yes |
| Jobs with checklists, parts and photos | — | Yes |
| Timesheets and unbilled hours | — | Yes |
| Inventory, purchasing, stock valuation | — | Yes |
| Documents from fill-in templates | — | Yes |
| Read-only client portal | — | Yes |
| Health and Operations dashboards | — | Yes |
| Decision log | — | Yes |
The argument
Why the one-time price is the recommended one.
It matches the product
A subscription to your own server is a strange thing to sell
DoveBoard runs on hardware you own and never asks us for permission. Charging rent on it every month would contradict the only real feature it has.
It matches the risk
Nothing here can be switched off remotely
There is no licence check phoning home, which means a one-time purchase is genuinely one-time. If we vanish, the copy on your machine carries on exactly as it is.
Monthly exists anyway
Because $40 up front is a real barrier for some people
The monthly option is there so cost isn't the reason you don't try it. It buys the same software. It is not a better tier and there is no upsell inside the app.
Questions
The ones that decide it.
What happens to my data if I stop paying?
Nothing. It is on your server, in a database file you can copy, and it stays there. That's not a policy we're promising to honour — it's a description of where the file is. There is no licence check in the application, so nothing about your install changes when a payment stops. What you'd lose is future updates, not your workspace, and not access to it.
Do I need to be technical?
You need to be able to follow written instructions and open a terminal window. Installing is a clone and one command; the database sets itself up on first boot. If you've ever run a Plex server or a Pi-hole, this is the same level of effort. If you haven't, the install page is written for someone who hasn't.
What does self-hosting cost me on top of this?
A machine to run it on, and that's the whole list. Either you already have one — a spare mini PC or laptop, which is free plus a few dollars a year of electricity — or you rent the smallest VPS a host will sell you, which is around five to seven dollars a month at the time of writing. The install page has the numbers. There are no per-seat fees, no storage tiers, and nothing metered.
Is there a trial?
Not yet, and we don't want to invent one on this page. The honest position: DoveBoard is self-hosted, so any trial has to be something you install, which makes "try it" and "run it" the same act. What that means in practice is a decision that hasn't been made, so rather than promise a fourteen-day something, this line will change when there's a real answer.
Can I move from Personal to Business later?
Yes, and it isn't a migration. Both plans are the same install and the same database — the Business plan adds eleven spaces to the app you're already running. Nothing gets exported, re-imported, or moved. Upgrading changes what your licence covers and then the spaces are there.
Is it per person, or per server?
This is one of the things still being decided, and inventing an answer here would be worse than saying so. What is true today: one install holds several accounts, each with genuinely separate data, and that is how the software works regardless of how it ends up being licensed.
What about refunds?
There is no refund policy yet, because there is nothing to refund yet. One will exist and be published before the first payment is taken — a purchase page without one isn't something we'd ask anybody to use.
Pre-launch
Or just get told when it opens.
One email, when DoveBoard is ready to install and ready to buy. No newsletter attached to it.