Seeed’s TRMNL DIY kit costs $44.90, and the finished TRMNL starts at $139. That gap shrinks fast once you price the case the kit skips and the license the dashboards run on, and the real total depends on one choice you make before ordering.
What arrives in the box
The kit is a build, not a product you unbox and hang. You get the 7.5-inch monochrome ePaper panel at 800×480, the XIAO ePaper display board with an ESP32-S3 Plus onboard, a 2,000mAh rechargeable battery, a 10cm FPC extension cable, the connector and a Wi-Fi antenna.
No enclosure sits in that list, and Seeed says so plainly on the product page before you pay.
TRMNL 7.5-inch (OG) DIY Kit
7.5-inch 800×480 ePaper panel · XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus board · 2,000mAh battery
Price: $44.90
Where to buy: Buy at Seeed Studio
A partial refresh takes 0.34 seconds. A full one takes 3.5 seconds.
That slow cadence suits a dashboard that shows a calendar, a weather forecast and a task list, and the battery runs up to three months in deep sleep on a six-hour refresh interval. It’s a screen that asks for a glance a few times a day, though it rules itself out for anything that moves, scrolls or needs an answer right now.
Open-source enclosure designs sit on Printables, Thingiverse and MakerWorld. A printed case costs filament and an afternoon, and a cheap photo frame works too. Either way the case is real money or real time, and pretending it’s free is how the $44.90 headline misleads people.
Four ways to run it and what each one costs
The TRMNL cloud path is the easy one. A BYOD license costs $50 one time, and it unlocks more than 375 ready-made plugins across 8 layouts, with calendars, weather, Shopify and GitHub among them. No code. No server to babysit.
The plugin library is the reason the license tempts people who swore they would self-host. Calendars, to-do lists, weather, stocks, Shopify sales and GitHub activity all sit one click from a blank dashboard, and the 8 layouts keep a kitchen screen readable from across the room without a single line of code from you.
SenseCraft, Seeed’s own no-code platform, costs nothing and flashes from a browser. Home Assistant through ESPHome also costs nothing if your house already runs a server, and it turns the panel into a native dashboard for your automations, your lights and your climate in one quiet frame. The dashboards you build there stay on your own server, and they cost you nothing but the evening you spend arranging them.
Self-hosting the TRMNL server software costs nothing either, and it keeps every byte of your calendar data on your own network. It also hands you a Docker stack to maintain on your own time, and the Arduino IDE waits for anyone who wants to go further.
| Path | Kit | License | Total with a printed case |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRMNL cloud (BYOD) | $44.90 | $50 | About $103 |
| SenseCraft | $44.90 | $0 | About $53 |
| Home Assistant (ESPHome) | $44.90 | $0 | About $53 |
| Self-hosted server | $44.90 | $0 | About $53 |
| TRMNL finished device | From $139 | Included | $139 |
Read the table as a trade, not a ranking. The free paths save you about $86 against the finished device and charge you in setup hours instead, while the cloud path saves about $36 and charges you an afternoon.
Neither answer is wrong, though only one matches a reader who has never flashed a board before and wants the thing working tonight.
What you give up against the finished TRMNL
Start with the ribbon cable. The FPC is fragile, Seeed warns that a damaged cable kills the screen outright, and routing it through a printed case is the fiddliest step of the whole build.
The finished TRMNL asks none of that from you. It arrives assembled, cased and licensed, and our TRMNL review covers what it feels like day to day, while the order post from June 2025 shows why a calm screen earned its desk space here.
You also give up certainty. Flashing goes smoothly for most builders, though a stubborn serial port can eat an evening, and the kit carries no single support door to knock on when a plugin misbehaves at midnight.
What you gain is control. The ESP32-S3 board is yours to reprogram, and Home Assistant runs natively without a subscription in sight.
TRMNL
Finished ePaper dashboard · Enclosure included · License included · No assembly at all
Price: From $139
Where to buy: Buy at TRMNL
If you would rather skip the build entirely
Seeed sells a middle path on Amazon. The XIAO 7.5-inch ePaper Panel runs the same size 800×480 monochrome screen inside a finished enclosure, works with Home Assistant out of the box, and pairs with TRMNL once you add access.
At $79.90 it costs more than the kit and less than the finished TRMNL, and it asks for no printing, no ribbon cable and no battery wiring at all. That panel is the right answer for a lot of readers, because it keeps the calm screen and the plugin library while dropping the two steps most likely to stall on a kitchen table.
Buy the kit if your house already runs Home Assistant, if your printer needs a job, or if you simply like building the thing you hang on the wall. Skip it if you want a dashboard that works the evening it arrives, because at $139 the finished TRMNL is the no-work option, and it earns that premium.
Seeed Studio XIAO 7.5-inch ePaper Panel
Finished enclosure · Home Assistant native
Price: $79.90
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon
