A consignment shop's software has one job it cannot get wrong: when an item sells for £47.50 and the consignor takes 60%, somebody has to decide who gets the half-penny.
Get that wrong consistently and you are either short-changing your consignors by a fraction of a penny per sale, or short-changing yourself. Over a year and a few thousand items, it becomes a number — and worse, it becomes an argument with a consignor holding a calculator.
This article is about the two hosted platforms, what they actually cost, and what a self-hosted ledger changes.
First: the prices, checked at the source
We are going to start with something unusual, because it happened while researching this piece.
A widely-syndicated comparison article states that ConsignCloud "starts at $129/month for Starter, $229/month for Pro, and $349/month for Enterprise."
We read ConsignCloud's own pricing page on 1 August 2026, and read it again on 5 September 2026 — every figure and every tier name below is unchanged. It shows:
Basic — "$139/month"
*Pro — "$189/month per location"*
Enterprise — "Custom/month/location"
Every figure in that comparison article is wrong, and so are all three tier names. Not stale — wrong in a way that would mislead anyone budgeting from it. (Our own price ledger, which read the same page on 5 July 2026, recorded "Basic $139/month (Pro $189/month per location)" — matching the vendor exactly, twenty-seven days apart.)
We mention this not to score a point but because it is the most useful practical advice in this article: when you are comparing software, open the vendor's own pricing page. Comparison sites — including this one — are secondary sources. The difference is that we link ours and date them so you can check.
SimpleConsign — from its own pricing page (read 5 September 2026 — unchanged):
Basic $159/month, billed monthly · Standard $259/month · Professional $359/month — "All prices per month, billed monthly, USD."
And SimpleConsign runs a second price list of its own. Professional carries an intro rate of $99/month, and the Vendor Mall Plus tier ($379) an intro of $199/month — each stated as running for "6 months or your first $50K in sales — whichever comes first" (read 5 September 2026). That is not a discount you can budget on: it ends on whichever clock runs out first, and the shop with the better year reaches the real price sooner. The three-year figures below use the standing prices, which is what you actually pay for thirty of those thirty-six months.
Over three years, for a single store:
| 36 months | |
|---|---|
| ConsignCloud Basic ($139) | $5,004 |
| ConsignCloud Pro ($189, per location) | $6,804 (one location) |
| SimpleConsign Basic ($159) | $5,724 |
| SimpleConsign Professional ($359) | $12,924 |
*Note ConsignCloud's Pro tier is priced per location*** — a second shop is a second $189, and the Enterprise tier is quoted per location too.
What you get for that
Both are complete platforms: point of sale, inventory by consignor, automatic split calculation, payouts, reporting, and in most tiers a store front end. For a shop doing real volume across a real till, that is a coherent product and $139–$159 a month is a defensible price for it.
These are not overpriced. They are priced for a shop that runs its entire operation on them.
The self-hosted option is deliberately smaller
Consigna is self-hosted consignment software — $84.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-20).
Try the Consigna demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
And it opens by telling you what it is not:
"Does it include point-of-sale hardware?" — "No — Consigna is the consignment ledger, not the register. It doesn't cover barcode scanners, cash drawers, or receipt printers."
That is the whole distinction. ConsignCloud and SimpleConsign replace your till. Consigna replaces your payout spreadsheet. If you need one system doing the sale and the split, this is not it.
What it is unusually specific about
"Is the math actually right?" — "That's the product. Integer cents plus basis points, round-half-up, remainder to the shop, invariant-tested across odd prices and awkward splits. The offline test suite ships in the box so you can verify it yourself."
Read that sentence properly, because it answers the half-penny question explicitly. Splits are computed in basis points rather than decimal percentages — so a 62.5% split is 6,250 basis points, an integer, not a float that drifts. Rounding is half-up, and the remainder goes to the shop, stated as policy rather than left to whatever the spreadsheet happened to do.
You may disagree with "remainder to the shop" — some shops give it to the consignor. The point is not which rule; the point is that there is a rule, it is written down, and it is the same on every transaction. That is precisely what a spreadsheet does not guarantee.
And the lock-in answer is direct:
"Consignors and items are quick manual entry, and everything exports to CSV at any time — you are never locked in."
Note the flip side of "quick manual entry": there is no bulk import. For a shop with 300 existing consignors, that is real data-entry work before you start.
Who each option is for
ConsignCloud or SimpleConsign — you want one system running the shop: till, inventory, splits, payouts, storefront. For a real retail operation, this is the right answer and the subscription is what it costs. Check whether your tier is per-location before you open a second shop.
Consigna — you already have a till you are happy with (or you are cash-and-card through a standalone terminal), and the thing that actually hurts is the payout spreadsheet at month end. You want the split arithmetic to be provably consistent and the payout ledger to be yours.
A spreadsheet — under about thirty consignors, with a split rule that never varies. Honestly. The tool earns its place when the rules differ per consignor and the volume makes month-end a chore.
The honest costs
No till, no hardware. Covered above; it is the main limitation.
No bulk import. Budget the data-entry time up front.
Backups are the payout ledger. This is money owed to other people. Losing the record does not just lose data — it loses the evidence of what you owe each consignor, and they will remember differently than you do. Test a restore before the first payout run.
Hosting. "PHP 8.1+ with pdo — present on virtually all cPanel/Plesk hosts." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages (a 5 September re-read of the web-hosting page returned the plan features with the price field unrendered, so these figures keep their August reading) — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
Consignment platforms are $139–$159 a month for a system that runs your whole shop, and that is a fair price for what it does — but check your tier, because ConsignCloud's Pro is per location.
If what you need is the till, buy one of them.
If you already have a till and what actually costs you time is the split-and-payout arithmetic, a self-hosted ledger with integer-cent, basis-point, round-half-up splits and a shipped test suite costs $84 once.
And whichever you choose: open the vendor's own pricing page. A comparison article got all three of ConsignCloud's tiers wrong while we were writing this one.
Next steps
- Open the live Consigna demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Consigna product page and license options — also sold in the Property Suite beside Rentara
- Rent or own — the five-year math with both sides priced properly
- The SaaS Price Observatory — ConsignCloud, SimpleConsign and every other tracked vendor, quoted verbatim from their own pages with verification dates
Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown. If one has changed since, the vendor's page is authoritative and ours is out of date — which is exactly why we publish the date.