How it works
Build it yourself, or have us build it with you.
Start it yourself in a few minutes and let us help as you go, or hand us what you have and we'll build it with you. What you get is a page at its own address, built on plain files you also keep a copy of.
Free while we're in beta. No card, and nothing is published until you say so. Keeping it online after beta will need payment, and we'll say what it costs this fall.
Doing it yourself
Three steps, at whatever pace the week allows.
Bring what you have
Paste an obituary, upload photos, or just answer a few questions. Rough notes are fine. The tools turn them into a real story you can edit line by line.
Invite the people who knew them
A private link lets family and friends add their own memories and photos. No accounts for them, and you approve everything before it appears.
The memorial goes live, and it stays
The memorial publishes at its own address, on plain pages built to last, with a complete copy of everything in your hands from day one.
One thing worth knowing: the first publish takes up to an hour while the web address and its security certificate are created. That happens once. We open the finished site ourselves, and only then email you the link. Every change after that shows up in a minute or two.
What you end up with
A finished one, built by a family.
This one was built by her family, not by us. Her garden, the stray cats she fed, her four sons and her daughter, the things a two-paragraph obituary has no room for.
Open it. It is a real page at its own address, and it is the clearest answer to what you are actually making here.
Included support
Doing it yourself doesn't mean doing it alone.
Our team is in the United States. Email them from inside your account and a person answers, not a bot. Help never costs extra.
Ask them to look over what you've written. Ask them to fix a photo that won't cooperate. If something is genuinely broken, they stay with it until it works. None of that costs extra.
If you'd rather not do the building at all, that isn't a favor to ask support for. It's the other path, and it has its own door.
The other way
We'll build it with you.
Plenty of families don't want to touch anything in the week after a death. Send us what you have. Photos, an obituary, a voice memo. We'll write the first draft, place the photos, and hand it back for you to change. You approve every word before anyone else sees it.
You can also switch paths at any point. Start it yourself and hand it to us halfway; we'll pick it up where you left off.
What it holds
Everything an obituary leaves out
The whole life story
Where they grew up, what they built, who they loved, the sayings you can still hear.
Photos and video
A gallery of their life, and video kept playable for decades, re-encoded as formats change.
Memories from everyone
Family and friends add their own stories and photos through a private link. No account needed.
A place to gather
Light a candle, leave a message, visit from any phone, anywhere, at any hour.
The memorial keeps growing
A memorial isn't finished the day it publishes. You'll remember something years later; a cousin will send a photo nobody had. We work it into the story without losing a word of what was already there. That's the part families tell us they didn't expect.