Guestmate vs FuneralGuestbook.app: which one is cheaper for your funeral home?
Guestmate is $75 a month and we start at $299. At one iPad they're $224 cheaper and at five still $24 cheaper; from six on we are, and from five if you pay us for the year. The reason is a pricing model rather than a feature list. The arithmetic, and the honest split.
Guestmate publishes $75 a month. We publish $299. If that were the whole story this would be a short page and you’d be reading theirs.
It isn’t the whole story, because the two prices are built differently: Guestmate charges per device; we charge by how many services you hold in a year. Which of us is cheaper depends on two numbers you already know — how many iPads go out at a busy visitation, and roughly how many services you held last year.
We make FuneralGuestbook, so weigh this accordingly. Everything below about Guestmate is quoted from their own site, read in August 2026.
The arithmetic
Guestmate’s own words: “You’ll need a mobile device license for each device connected to your account,” and “Additional mobile devices are $50 per device per month.”
| iPads at one funeral home | Guestmate Basic | FuneralGuestbook |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $75/mo | $299/mo |
| 2 | $125/mo | $299/mo |
| 3 | $175/mo | $299/mo |
| 4 | $225/mo | $299/mo |
| 5 | $275/mo | $299/mo |
| 6 | $325/mo | $299/mo |
Guestmate is cheaper at one device, by $224 a month, and stays cheaper through five, where the gap is $24. From six devices on we are, and the gap widens with every stand you put out. Their Enhanced plan is $100/month and adds embedding recent services on your website; the per-device charge applies the same way.
Our column is one price because we don’t charge per device. What our price does move with is services a year: $299 a month covers up to 125, $499 up to 250, $999 up to 500. So the table above is the table for a funeral home holding up to about ten services a month. Past 125 a year we’re $499, and the same table reads Guestmate’s way in every row: they’re cheaper month to month from one iPad through nine, and we’re cheaper from ten.
If you put out one stand and that’s it, twelve months of Guestmate is $900 against $3,588 of ours paid monthly — or $2,999 if you pay us for the year, which is still more than they cost. They publish no annual rate, so that’s their monthly price times twelve.
What Guestmate does well
They publish their prices. Of the five digital funeral guestbook systems we could find, only two publish a full price list and Guestmate is one of them. If you have ever tried to comparison-shop this category on a weeknight, you know what that’s worth.
It’s lean on purpose. Their Basic plan is one iPad with no cap on events, export to CSV or XLS, export to Avery address labels. It does the core job — guests sign, you get a list — without a lot of surface area to learn. For a funeral home that wants exactly that and nothing else, more product is not automatically better product.
Bring your own hardware. They’ve “tested extensively with Apple iPads to be used for the kiosk,” and you supply the iPad and the stand. If you already have an iPad in a drawer, that’s real.
What’s different here
However a guest signs, what comes back is data — not a photograph of a page. They can write with a stylus or a finger the way they’d sign a paper register, or tap a line and type; the page opens in pen, and the choice is the guest’s. Either way what the family gets is structured contact detail — name, phone, email, mailing address. That difference shows up in the week after the service, when someone would otherwise be squinting at a signature to work out whether it says Erikson or Frikson.
It works with no signal. Offline mode with auto-sync, so a chapel with a dead spot isn’t a problem you discover on a Saturday. Guestmate makes no offline claim on their site either way.
The price doesn’t move with iPad count. Ours moves with how many services you hold in a year; theirs moves with how many devices you connect. That’s the table above, and it’s the main structural difference between us — and it means the two of us get cheaper for opposite kinds of funeral home.
Address labels for thank-you cards. Both of us export to Avery sheets — theirs is a headline feature on their cheapest plan, and it’s one of the things they got right early.
Count two things: the iPads at your busiest visitation, and your services last year
Not your average visitation — your busiest one. Those two numbers settle most of this page.
Up to four iPads and a quiet year — Guestmate is the better buy, by $224 a month at one and $74 at four, and paying us for the year doesn’t close it. We’d rather say that plainly than have you work it out after signing with us. At $75 a month it is the cheapest published price in the category, and it does the job it says it does.
Three iPads, and Guestmate is still cheaper. A second stand costs them $50 a month and costs us nothing, but at three they’re $175 a month against our $299 — or $2,100 a year against our $2,999 paid yearly. It turns at five if you pay us for the year, $3,300 of theirs against $2,999, and at six month to month, $325 against $299. From there the gap keeps widening with every stand you add.
Over 125 services a year, run it again at $499. There Guestmate is cheaper month to month from one iPad through nine, and we are from ten on.
Two things sit outside the count and can override it either way. One is your building: if a chapel has a dead spot, or you’ve moved a service to a hall with Wi-Fi nobody can log into, ask both of us what happens when the iPad has no signal for an entire visitation. The other is what you want back on Monday — a typed list you can mail from, or a set of files somebody still has to read through.
Every price and quotation here was read from the named vendor’s own published pages in August 2026. This category changes; if something has gone out of date, tell us and we’ll correct it.
The funeral.link Team