A split-flap display, the flip-letter board from old airports, on a screen you already own. Show a menu, a countdown, live prices, the weather, or a message a guest writes and watches clatter onto the wall. The real ones cost thousands and hang in one place. This is $49, on any TV, monitor or iPad.
Scan it and type. It lands on this board, the one in front of you, nobody else's. On your own board a whole room does this at once, and nothing appears until you allow it.
The best thing in any airport was never the lounge. It was the board. That sound when a whole wall of letters turns over at once, and the entire terminal looks up.
So I set out to find how they work, and got completely obsessed. I pulled apart footage of real Solari boards frame by frame: how long a flap takes to fall, where it slows, how a letter settles, why a row ripples instead of turning all at once. Get any of that wrong and the eye knows straight away.
SplitMotion™ is what came out of that. Every flap, timed against the real thing. Then all the parts a mechanical board cannot do: every language, every symbol, every emoji, any size, on a screen you already own.
A physical split-flap board runs into the thousands: a Vestaboard is around $3,500, and a custom Oat Foundry wall is $15,000 and up. They ship in months and hang in one place. This is the same beautiful thing, on the television behind you, from $49.
Donny Sin
It is switched off, or showing a screensaver, or playing Netflix with the sound down. A screen you already paid for, in the best position in the room, earning nothing.
A black rectangle on the wall. The one thing every customer faces while they wait, and it says nothing at all.
Someone else's programme, someone else's adverts, in your room. It fills the silence and sells nothing of yours.
A photograph of a page, changed by whoever knows how, whenever they next get around to it.
Give it something to do. Your prices, your specials, the countdown to happy hour, and messages from the people standing in front of it. The same screen, the same electricity, doing your job instead of somebody else's.
Give each TV a name and it shows its own board. The menu in the kitchen, the welcome at the door, the countdown behind the bar, all from one Mac and one licence.
The menu, changed from your phone while the queue is still at the door. Happy hour turns itself on at five.
A guest welcomed by name, the hours, what is next in the calendar, and an alert that takes every screen at once.
The room writes to the board from their own phones, and nothing appears until you allow it.
A transparent overlay straight into OBS. Follower goals, now playing, countdown to going live.
Prices, offers, opening hours, and the weather that is about to walk through the door.
The piece, the artist, the year, changing as the room does. It belongs anywhere the space has been thought about.
The school run, whose turn it is, and a message waiting on the kitchen TV for whoever gets home first.
A mechanical board is a beautiful object. It is also a machine with hundreds of moving parts, hanging in exactly one place.
Flaps, motors and bearings wear out. Repairs mean parts, a service call, or shipping the thing back.
The noise is the mechanism. Reviewers stop talking while it turns over. Ours has a volume, and an off switch.
Fixed size, fixed place, fixed number of characters, decided the day it was built. Want a second room? Buy a second board.
About $119 a year for the content feeds. On top of the $3,499 you already spent on the board. Ours is the yearly fee without the three and a half thousand first.
The signage services charge every month, for every screen. Four menu TVs is about $32 a month, forever, and it climbs with every screen you add.
$49 once. Every screen you own. Nothing to break, nothing to service, and you can silence it.
All of it works today. The four marked MAC read something living on your own computer, so those need the app.
| Menus | Sections, several price columns, dotted leaders, automatic paging, and a happy hour that turns itself on and off. |
| Countdowns | To a date, or to a time that comes round again, rolling on to tomorrow by itself. |
| Clocks | 12 or 24 hour, seconds, any date format. |
| World clocks | Several cities at once, for anyone whose work is somewhere else. |
| Weather | Feels like, today's high and low, rain chance, humidity, UV, wind. Several cities at once, in Celsius or Fahrenheit. |
| Pictures | A photograph or a logo filling the whole screen, in the rotation with everything else. |
| Prices | Crypto and stocks with the move in green or red, and your own holdings. |
| News and feeds | Headlines on any subject, or any RSS feed you already read. |
| Messages | Anything you want said. Any language, emoji and special symbols included. |
| Alerts | Takes over every screen the moment you press it, then hands the rotation back on its own. |
| Calendar MAC | Counts down to your next real event. |
| Now playing MAC | Whatever Music or Spotify is playing. |
| Mail and messages MAC | The newest one, shown with a name rather than a number. |
| Social counters | Follower and subscriber counts on the wall. |
| Battery MAC | How much charge the Mac driving the board has left, which matters when it is somewhere awkward. |
| Webhooks | Anything else you can send from another system lands on the board. |
| Audience screens | Polls, trivia, Q&A, guest book, confessions, anonymous messages and dare requests. A QR code appears on the board. A guest points their phone camera at it, taps once, and is typing. Their message, vote, question or dare arrives for you to approve. No app to download, no account, nothing to install. |
| A video they can post | After a guest sends a message, their phone makes a short video of those words flapping onto your board, in your colours and signed with your name. They share it. That is your venue on their story, made by them. |
| Moderation | Nothing reaches the wall until you allow it. A rude-word filter across about twenty languages catches the obvious and the disguised, with an optional second opinion from Google. |
| When guests can send | Opening hours for the code on the wall, so the board is not collecting messages at four in the morning. Or a countdown, when a question is only open for the next hour. |
| Messages from away | Give the board a name and anyone can write to it from getflappi.com/send without being in the room. Off unless you turn it on, per screen. |
| How they take turns | Set how long each message holds the screen, and it works through them in turn with no repeats, carrying on where it left off. A new message can jump straight on instead of waiting. |
| Languages | Most of them. Arabic and Hebrew run right to left properly. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Cyrillic. Emoji on the flaps. |
| Sound | The real clack of the flaps, with a volume control, or silent. |
| Grid | From 10 to 48 columns and 3 to 24 rows, up to 1,152 flaps. Or switch on fill and the board stretches to the exact shape of the screen, portrait or landscape. |
| Colour | Pick the background and the letters yourself, plus an accent. For the whole board, or one screen at a time, so the menu can be warm and the alert can be red. |
| Palettes | Ready-made colour pairs that already work together, and save your own so the whole board matches your brand in one tap. |
| Display modes | Fullscreen, screensaver, wallpaper, or a transparent overlay for streaming into OBS. |
| Screens per licence | Unlimited. Name a TV and it shows its own board. |
| Runs on | macOS 14+, iPad, or any browser. Send it to a TV or monitor over wifi or a cable. |
| Phone control | Scan, approve the device on the Mac, and it is the same editor in your hand. Save it to the home screen and it opens like an app. |
| Boards | Several open at once as tabs, saving as you type. Close one and it waits in saved boards; delete it and the bin holds it thirty days. |
| Undo | Forty steps, and every version of the board kept on the Mac. |
| Scheduling | Any screen can run only on chosen days, between chosen hours, or take the whole board while it does. |
| Screen time | Anything from four seconds to eight hours on one screen, or tell it to stay put and never move on. |
| Scan counts | How many people scanned and how many wrote something, by the hour, so you know whether it pulls at three in the afternoon or only at closing. A count, never who. |
| Network | Everything local stays on your own wifi. No account needed to run a menu, and no internet needed either. |
| Updates | Free, forever, signed so nothing else can pretend to be one. |
That is the whole idea.
Working in two minutes. Nothing to ship, nothing to wait for, nothing to plug in. Open a page on the TV, type six characters, and the board is on the wall. Every other option on this page posts you a box first.
Use code FLAPPI at checkout for 50% off the $99 price.
Unlimited TVs. Never charged per screen. The Mac app, yours for good. $99 after the first hundred. The app and your key arrive by email the moment you buy.
Billed once a year, $150. Unlimited screens, not per screen. Everything the one-off gets, plus the board online.
Unlimited TVs. Never charged per screen. Same download as the one-off; your key is what makes it Live. Both arrive by email the moment you buy. Questions first?
Buy it once. The Mac runs the board and sends it to your TVs over your own wifi, or down an HDMI cable. Nothing passes through us. The catch: guests must be on the same wifi to scan the code and write to the board, so somebody on mobile data cannot reach it, and neither can a TV in another building. The Mac needs the internet only for the weather, news and prices.
Live. The board is online, so a TV anywhere reaches it and guests write to it from mobile data with no wifi password. That is the part running on our servers every month, which is why it is the part that costs every month.
Unlimited TVs either way. You are never charged per screen.
FLAPPI is software that turns any TV, monitor, iPad or browser into a split-flap display, the flipping letter boards used in old airports and railway stations. It runs on a Mac or in a web browser, so there is no hardware to buy.
A physical split-flap board runs from around $3,500 for a Vestaboard to $15,000 and up for a custom Oat Foundry wall, plus about $119 a year, and it hangs in one place. FLAPPI is $99 once for the Mac app, currently $49 for the first hundred buyers, or $150 a year for the app plus the online version, which lets guests write to the board from mobile data and share a video of their message. Unlimited TVs either way, on screens you already own.
Yes. Guests scan a QR code, type a message on their phone with no app to download, and it appears on the board once the owner approves it. Their phone then makes a video of their message on the board that they can share to Instagram.
Yes. Any TV with a web browser can show the board by opening a short address or pairing with a six-character code. A monitor with no browser needs an HDMI cable or a cheap streaming stick.
Choose FLAPPI Live if you want any of three things: guests to scan the code and message the board from their own phone data instead of having to join your wifi first; the board to keep running with the Mac closed, on a streaming stick behind the TV; or to edit the board from anywhere. Choose FLAPPI Board, the one-off, if your Mac is already there and staying on and guests will be on your wifi. Live is $12.50 a month billed yearly at $150; Board is $99 once, currently $49.
For more than one screen, yes. Yodeck and most signage tools charge per screen per month, around $8 to $15 each. FLAPPI Live is $12.50 a month total for unlimited screens, so a venue with three TVs pays once, not three times. FLAPPI also does the split-flap look and lets guests message the board, which general signage tools do not.
Yes, on FLAPPI Live. After a guest posts a message, a button can open your own payment page, a Stripe or PayPal link or a charity page, and a Stripe link includes Apple Pay automatically. The money goes straight to you or the charity; FLAPPI never touches it, so there is nothing held on your behalf. You paste your own link in the screen's settings.
Any place with a screen and something to say: cafés, bars and restaurants for menus and specials; hotels and offices for welcomes and what's on; shops for prices and offers; galleries and studios for the piece and the artist; weddings and events for messages the room writes; streamers as a live overlay; and homes for the family board. It is also used as plain digital signage and advertising. Most venue screens sit switched off or playing a channel nobody chose; FLAPPI turns the same screen into a split-flap board you change from your phone, that guests can write to and share.
The Messages and iMessage screens show the latest text on the board. To show a person's name instead of their phone number, FLAPPI needs Contacts access on the Mac, which macOS only grants when you allow it. If you see a number, open System Settings, Privacy and Security, Contacts, and switch FLAPPI on. Nothing about your contacts leaves the Mac; the name is looked up on the spot and only the latest message is shown.
Menus and prices, countdowns, clocks and world clocks, the weather, share and crypto prices, news and RSS headlines, social follower counts, calendars, polls, trivia, guest messages, and anything sent to it by a webhook such as Home Assistant.