Your Book Nest
ResourceMate has no pricing page. The figure a small library actually pays is spread across three separate vendor sub-pages - the licence, the annual support plan, and the hosted option - and never added up in one place. Added up, a ~200-item volunteer library that wants to print its own barcode labels pays roughly $880 in the first year, then about $190 every year after that, plus the Windows PC it runs on. All prices here are USD.
The "one-time licence" headline is the part that hides the recurring cost. The licence is bought once, but the support plan that keeps it working is annual, and the software still needs a computer to sit on.
The one-time licence, edition by edition
ResourceMate sells six editions as a one-time purchase. For a small library the relevant rungs are Lite at $295, Essential at $495, and Essential Plus at $695, rising to Extended at $895 and Premium at $1,795 for larger collections.
The item caps are generous - Lite holds 2,500 items, Essential 10,000 - so a 200-item library never buys up for capacity. It buys up for features, and the feature that catches most small libraries out is barcode-label printing.
Barcode-label printing is edition-gated. Base Lite and base Essential cannot print barcode labels at all - only the Plus editions and the Extended and Premium tiers can. So a library that wants to print its own spine and pocket labels cannot use the $495 Essential licence; it has to move up to Essential Plus at $695. That $200 step is easy to miss when you are reading a price list that starts at $495. (Why barcodes carry a cost premium across the whole market is covered in why library barcodes are so expensive.)
The annual support plan is the recurring cost
Support is a separate plan, billed every year, and it is what turns a "one-time" purchase into an ongoing bill. For the small-library editions it runs from $142 a year for Lite up to $528 a year for Premium with the live-chat add-on. Essential support is $156 a year; Essential Plus, the barcode-printing edition, is $188 a year.
Support is registration-gated. Let it lapse and the features that depend on it fall away - ISBN lookup, program updates, the monthly off-site backup, the anniversary data check. It is not a maintenance plan you can quietly drop and keep a fully working system; several of the things a library uses day to day are tied to it.
So the Essential Plus library pays $695 once, plus $188 a year, indefinitely. Year one is about $880. Every year after is about $190.
The Windows PC nobody prices in
The desktop editions are a Windows install. That means the true cost includes a Windows computer at the circulation desk for the software to live on, and the catalogue lives on that one machine. A volunteer cannot open a browser at home and check the shelf; the data is where the PC is, unless you pay to network it or move to the hosted edition.
Networking adds its own line. ResourceMate allows a small number of simultaneous users, and beyond that each additional concurrent user is a further $100 licence. Two volunteers checking books in and out at the same time on separate machines is where that starts to bite.
The hosted "Online" edition is a per-user subscription
ResourceMate does offer a cloud-hosted edition, which removes the Windows-PC problem - but the one-time-licence framing does not apply to it. It is billed at $295 per user account per year, plus a $75 one-time set-up fee.
That is a genuine recurring subscription, and it is per user. Two people who need to be in the system at once is two accounts, so $590 a year before the set-up fee.
What it totals for a small volunteer library
For a ~200-item church, hospice or study-group library that wants a working system with printable barcodes, the honest desktop total is:
- Essential Plus licence, one-time: $695 (the cheapest edition that prints barcode labels)
- Essential Plus annual support: $188 a year
- A Windows PC for the desk to run it on
- Optional: $100 per extra concurrent user if two volunteers work at once
Year one lands near $880 plus the PC; each following year is about $190. The hosted route trades the PC for $295 per user per year plus a $75 set-up fee.
It is a capable desktop system with a long history - just more, and more scattered, than "one-time licence" suggests.
How Your Book Nest compares on price
Your Book Nest is a flat $60 a year, everything included, nothing to install. That is the whole bill - no edition to buy up to, no separate support plan, no PC to buy, no per-seat charge.
Barcode labels are included at no extra cost. Every copy gets a generated three-word code, like oak-bat-tree, that prints on a label on plain Avery stock and is typed or scanned off the cover - so there is no barcode-printing edition to unlock and no scanner to buy.
Every volunteer gets their own individual login at no extra charge, so there is no per-user maths to do - the reason library software that doesn't charge per user matters most to a small team. And because it runs in the browser, any volunteer can open the catalogue from home, from a phone, or from the desk, with the data in one place for all of them.
The home page is a live demo - add a book, give it two copies, and lend them to two people, with no download, no account, and no card. For the wider picture of what these tools charge and why, what library software really costs and why library software is so expensive both cover the ground.
Who should stay with ResourceMate
ResourceMate does several things Your Book Nest deliberately does not, and a library that needs them should stay put. It imports and exports MARC records and pulls from the Library of Congress; it runs a public web catalogue; it manages holds and a reserve shelf; it collects fines and fees; it has a circulation rules engine and deep, customisable reports. It also runs entirely offline, and if you forgo the support plan the licence really is a one-time cost with no recurring bill at all.
If offline desktop ownership matters more to you than browsing from home, or if you need MARC, a public catalogue, or fines, ResourceMate earns its price. Your Book Nest is for the library that wants none of that and just wants to lend its books simply, from anywhere, for one flat yearly figure.
