The Digital Guestbook vs FuneralGuestbook: per case, or per month

The Digital Guestbook charges “around $185 per case.” We charge $149 a month. Those two sentences describe completely different businesses, and which one is cheaper for your funeral home is a question of arithmetic you can do in about thirty seconds.

We make FuneralGuestbook. Everything about The Digital Guestbook below is quoted from their own site, read in August 2026 — and if you’re still surveying the field rather than down to two, we priced every system in the category separately.

The arithmetic

Services a month	The Digital Guestbook (~$185/case)	FuneralGuestbook
1	~$185	$149/mo
2	~$370	$149/mo
4	~$740	$149/mo
8	~$1,480	$149/mo
15	~$2,775	$149/mo

There is no row where per-case is cheaper, because the crossover sits below one service a month. A single case at $185 already costs more than a flat $149 month.

Which means the useful comparison isn’t monthly at all — it’s annual, and it’s for funeral homes that would use a registry only occasionally. Eight services in a year at $185 is about $1,480, against $1,499 for a year of ours paid annually. Below roughly eight services a year, per-case is genuinely the cheaper structure. Above it, the flat month wins and keeps winning.

And cost alone is the wrong frame here anyway, because their model has an advantage the table can’t show: you only pay when you use it. They say so directly — “There is no minimum case requirement - you are always in control of when and how you use it.” If you want a registry out only for the large visitations and a paper book for the rest, per-case is the structure that fits, and a monthly subscription is money burning between services.

Their pricing is a starting figure rather than a full list — “prices vary based on your funeral home’s size and how you plan to use the service” — with per-case arrangements, equipment rental, or monthly plans available, no contract, and a free trial on a real case. Their $185 also includes the equipment, rented for the service; our $149 assumes you already own the iPads.

What they have more of than we do

Customers on the record. They name them: Sax-Tiedemann Funeral Home and Crematorium, Simkins Funeral Home, Ryan-Parke Funeral Home, with substantive testimonials attached. They also publish a volume figure — “Over 45,000 unique guest sign-ins in 2025.”

That is more public evidence of real use than anyone else in this category has published, including us. We’re newer and our customer list is shorter. If you’re the kind of buyer who wants to call somebody who already uses the thing, they are better positioned to hand you a phone number than we are, and you should factor that in.

Acknowledgment cards, fulfilled. They pair thank-you cards with pre-addressed envelopes so the family isn’t addressing anything. We export address labels for the guests who left a mailing address, printed onto Avery sheets — your staff prints them. Theirs is the more complete service for the family.

Commercial hardware. Their pitch is “large commercial-grade touch screens monitors are user friendly and approachable for all ages” rather than an iPad. On a busy visitation with older guests, a big screen at a comfortable height is a real thing and not a gimmick.

The argument of theirs we agree with

“Website-based guestbooks rely on guests remembering to sign later, The Digital Guestbook is built for in-person engagement. It captures attendance during the service, when participation is highest.”

They’re right, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than pretending it’s a dig at us. A device in the room collects what a link in an online obituary doesn’t. Our iPad is in the room for the same reason theirs is. If you’re weighing either of us against a website condolence book, that quote is the argument, and it applies to both of us equally.

What’s different here

Portability. An iPad and a stand move between chapels, go out to a church hall, and get carried by one person. A commercial touchscreen is the flip side of “commercial-grade” — sturdier where it sits, harder to move.

Offline. We run with no signal and sync when we find one. Their Wi-Fi answer is to fall back to QR sign-in or a portable router, which works, but relies on a connection existing somewhere.

Handwriting, transcribed. Guests sign the way they’d sign a paper register, and what comes back is structured contact detail rather than an image.

A flat price with unlimited services, which is the table at the top.

Count your cases for the year, not the month

That is the number this decision turns on, and you already know it. Under about eight services a year, The Digital Guestbook is the cheaper structure and you are not paying for months you don’t use. Over it, the arithmetic moves and keeps moving.

Two things can outweigh the number. If you want acknowledgment cards fulfilled end to end rather than exported, they do that and we don’t. And if you want to phone a funeral home already running the thing before you sign, they can put you on to one more easily than we can.

What moves the decision back the other way is a chapel with no signal, a registry that travels between buildings, and wanting a typed contact list rather than a book — those are ours.

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.