What a digital funeral guestbook costs in 2026

Of the 32 funeral-home software products listed on GetApp’s funeral-home category, all 32 show “No pricing info” — the category’s default answer to “what does it cost” is a demo request. This piece is the opposite of a demo request. Here is what a digital funeral guestbook costs, model by model, with every number sourced from its own source’s page as of late July 2026 — including ours.

The paper register book isn’t free either

Start with the baseline, because it isn’t zero. A funeral home buys register books wholesale for $6.79 to $37.76 from a trade supplier, and a typical general price list bills the family $60 for the register book, or $200 for the package. That is the line a digital funeral guestbook actually competes against — a product the funeral home already stocks, already bills, and already earns a margin on. The question was never “free versus paid.” It is whether the names in the book are worth more than the book.

The four ways vendors charge

Every price in this market is one of four models. Knowing which one you’re looking at matters more than the sticker.

Model	Who pays	A live example
Per service	The funeral home, per event	Guestpix (weddings-into-memorials): $49 to $119 per event
Monthly, metered by services	The funeral home	MemoryShare (livestreaming): $199 to $349 a month by service count
Monthly, metered by devices	The funeral home	Guestmate: $75 a month, plus $50 for each device beyond the first
“Free”	The family, or advertisers	Legacy.com, newspaper obituaries

The metered models are both live and irreconcilable: one vendor counts your services, another counts your iPads — a busy month punishes you under one, and a second chapel under the other. The number on the card is the floor, not the bill.

What “free” actually costs

The free model is the one worth slowing down on, because someone always pays — it just isn’t the funeral home, and the terms live in the fine print.

Legacy.com’s own pricing guide puts a $159 obituary package in front of the family, with the Guest Book bundled in — free to the funeral home, paid by the household in the worst week of its year. Newspapers run the same play: the Daily Herald’s obituary “begins at $280.00, for the first 15 lines or less,” and the charges “include posting of a digital obituary on dailyherald.com with a guestbook”. And what the family gets for that money is often a rental — the Times Tribune’s death notice states that “family and friends can post to the Guestbook for 90 days”. Ninety days, for a record of who stood with you.

The mechanism behind free is stated plainly by the vendors themselves: one funeral-website provider promises “you will never pay for your CFS website” in the same breath as a 50/50 split on marked-up florist prices. None of this is a scandal; it is a business model. But a funeral home that offers a family a “free” guestbook should know exactly who is paying for it, and with what.

The hardware line nobody quotes

Any iPad-based funeral guestbook — ours included — stands on hardware the software quote leaves off. Apple’s entry-level iPad starts at $449; a commercial locking floor stand runs roughly $100 to $450 from the kiosk-stand vendors. Call it $550 to $900 per chapel before any subscription, and less if you buy refurbished. The one line that costs nothing: locking the iPad to a single app is a built-in iPadOS setting, not an add-on — a point we’ve made at length elsewhere.

Where we stand

FuneralGuestbook.app is $149 a month for a single location — the whole product, unlimited services and entries, every family feature included. Up to three locations is $249; up to five is $349; plans differ only by the number of locations, never by what a family experiences. Two weeks free, month to month, cancel anytime. The price is on the page because we think the demo-request model is the wrong way to treat a busy operator.

For scale: NFDA’s current median for a funeral with viewing and burial is $8,300. A $149 subscription is about 1.8% of one median funeral — per month, for every service in the building. Whether that trade is worth it comes down to what the record is worth to you afterward: the names, the relationships, the addresses that no other record of the service captures, and the quiet pre-need signals sitting inside them.

The question under the question

The subscription is the small number in this piece. The larger one is the $60 to $200 a funeral home already bills for a paper register book that goes home in a box — a record nobody can mail a thank-you from or call. The honest cost comparison isn’t digital versus free. It is what you pay for a book that ends, versus what you pay for a record that keeps working after the service is over.