Your Book Nest
A ~200-item volunteer library pays about $36 a year for TinyCat - $3 a month, the cheapest bracket. That figure is genuinely lower than Your Book Nest's flat $60 a year.
The number is hard to find because TinyCat's pricing page doesn't lay it out as a table you can scan, and the figure moves on two axes at once: what kind of library you are, and how big your collection is.
What the $36 actually buys
TinyCat prices on two axes. The first is library type. A "volunteer library" - no paid library staff and no regular acquisitions budget over $1,000 - starts at $3 a month. A paid-staff library starts at $10 a month for the same small collection, so the moment you pay anyone or spend past that budget line, the entry price roughly triples (all figures USD).
The second axis is collection size. The $3 rate covers a volunteer collection up to 500 items. Past that it steps to $4 a month up to 1,000 items, and keeps climbing toward the top of the small-library range at about $35 a month for the largest collections.
So a ~200-item church or community library, run by volunteers, sits firmly in the $3 bracket. That is the $36 a year. It is real, and it is cheap.
Where the meter climbs
The collection-size meter is the part worth watching, because of how TinyCat counts.
TinyCat has no copies management. Each physical copy of a book is its own catalogue record, so three copies of a popular title are three records, not one title with three copies. Every one of those duplicate records counts toward your collection-size bracket. A library with 400 distinct titles but a healthy number of duplicates can cross the 500-item line and move from $3 to $4 a month without adding a single new title. The structure that avoids this - one title, many copies under it - is in how to track multiple copies of the same book.
That is the quiet cost. The sticker price is metered by a number your duplicates inflate, so the price you pay tracks your shelves less than it tracks how your catalogue happens to be structured.
The costs the subscription doesn't cover
The subscription is not the whole spend.
TinyCat has no built-in barcode label printing. It sells pre-printed label sheets in the LibraryThing Store, or expects you to export your catalogue and run a mail-merge through something like Avery Design & Print. Either way, labels are a separate, recurring supply cost on top of the subscription. A USB barcode scanner is an optional extra purchase too, if you want to scan rather than type.
There is no hardware server to buy - TinyCat is cloud software - but the label and scanner spend is real, and the vendor's own price page won't total it for you. For the wider version of this, what library software really costs walks through the add-ons that rarely make the headline figure.
Billing in practice
A few mechanics that shape the true cost. Annual billing is exactly twelve times the monthly rate - there is no annual discount, so $3 a month is $36 a year and nothing less. Billing runs in US dollars through PayPal, so a library outside the US pays currency conversion on top and can't pay in its own currency. An account left unpaid for 30 days is auto-disabled; monthly plans cancel any time with no minimum term.
TinyCat also rides LibraryThing. You need a (free) LibraryThing account, and editing catalogue or patron records bounces you out to LibraryThing's own site to do it. That is not a fee, but it is part of what you are signing up to.
Who should stay with TinyCat
If your library leans on LibraryThing's catalogue depth - series, disambiguated editions, reviews, awards data, Z39.50 and MARC import - TinyCat is built on exactly that, and at $36 a year for a small volunteer collection it is inexpensive for what it gives you. If you want a public catalogue your patrons can browse (an OPAC), patron self-service accounts, or a holds queue, TinyCat has all three and Your Book Nest does not. For those libraries, the $36 is money well spent.
If you're weighing TinyCat as a lending tool more broadly, whether you can use LibraryThing to lend books covers the wider fit, and why library software gets expensive explains what usually drives the price up.
How Your Book Nest compares
Your Book Nest is a flat $60 a year, full stop. Not metered by collection size, not stepped by how many items you hold, and the same whether you run one shelf or five thousand books. At the very bottom of the range TinyCat's $36 undercuts that. What the flat price buys is predictability: the figure you pay this year is the figure you pay next year, and copies never nudge you toward a higher bracket.
That last point is the structural difference. Your Book Nest stores every physical copy as its own record under one title, so a donated third copy is one line, not a re-catalogued duplicate, and it doesn't inflate any meter. Every copy gets a generated three-word code printed on its label - read it off the cover and type it, no scanner to buy - and label printing is built in and free on blank Avery 5162 stock, so there is no pre-printed-label supply line.
The home page is a live demo with no signup and no LibraryThing account - add a book, give it two copies, and lend them to two people to see the whole thing work. If you're comparing more broadly, the Librarika vs Your Book Nest comparison sets out the same flat-price case against another close competitor.
