Most people arriving at this question are already buying a plaque. For a bench, an urn, a garden stone, the base of a headstone. The real decision is not whether to have a plaque. It is whether that plaque should also carry a code.
We sell the version with the code, so weigh that. The honest answer is that a plain engraved plaque is a perfectly good memorial and a great many families should buy one and stop reading.
What each one actually does
| Plain engraved plaque | Plaque with a QR code | |
|---|---|---|
| Holds | A name, dates, one short line | Photographs, video, voice, stories |
| Works for | Everyone, always | Anyone with a phone and signal |
| Depends on | Nothing | A company continuing to exist |
| Can be changed | No, ever | Yes, endlessly |
| Cost per word | Real, and rises | Nothing |
| Typical UK price | £15 to £60 | £60 to £110 |
| Track record | Centuries | About fifteen years |
The case for the plain plaque
It is stronger than anybody selling codes tends to admit.
It cannot fail. No server, no company, no domain renewal, no subscription, no password, no signal. A piece of engraved metal does its whole job forever with no maintenance beyond an occasional wipe. Nothing else on this page can say that.
Everyone can read it. A visitor with no smartphone, a flat battery, no interest in technology, or arthritic hands still reads the name. At a graveside that is a substantial proportion of people, and it is the proportion most likely to have known the person.
It looks like what it is. Some families genuinely dislike the look of a code on a memorial, and that is a coherent aesthetic position rather than ignorance.
It is cheaper. Often by half.
Nobody has to maintain it. The failure mode of digital memorials is not technical. It is that the page never gets filled in, or the person who managed it dies and nobody else can get in.
The case for adding the code
One argument, really, and everything else is detail.
A plaque has room for about twelve words.
"In loving memory of Margaret Hall, 1938 to 2025. Much loved." That is the complete public record of eighty-seven years. It says nothing about the fact that she taught four hundred children to read, or that she narrated the television, or the exact way she said your name when she was pleased with you.
All of that is currently held in the heads of people who will also, in time, die. Our view, and it is our view rather than a measured figure, is that ordinary family memory runs to about three generations. Ask what you can say about your own great-grandparents beyond a name on a certificate. For most people it is very little, and not because nobody cared. It is because nobody wrote it down while there was still somebody who knew.
A code is an attempt at that gap. And the thing it holds that no plaque ever can is voice. Faces last a long time in memory. Voices go within a few years, and there is no way to engrave one.
The money argument, which surprises people
Engraving is priced per character or per line. So on a plain plaque, every extra word costs money, and there is a hard physical limit beyond which no amount of money buys you more room.
Say you have £70 to spend beyond the basic name and dates.
Spent on lettering, that buys roughly one more short line. "A wonderful mother, grandmother and great-grandmother." True, dignified, and it tells a stranger in 2085 nothing whatsoever about her.
Spent on a code and page, that buys the photographs, the stories, her voice, and whatever forty other people remember about her, with nothing charged by the word. A page does have a capacity, and any supplier who tells you otherwise is guessing rather than promising, but it is measured in hundreds of photographs rather than in lines of text.
That is not an argument for skipping the inscription. It is an argument about the marginal seventy pounds, and it is worked through more fully in memorial QR code or a longer headstone inscription.
Why the answer is usually both
Here is the thing that resolves most of the argument, and it is not a compromise.
Put the name and dates on the plaque, and the code beside them.
A plaque carrying only a code is a poor memorial. It is anonymous. A passer-by has no idea whose it is and no reason to scan it, and to somebody without a phone it means nothing at all. That is the version people are right to object to.
A plaque carrying a name, two dates and a small code is a proper memorial that also happens to open. It works with no signal, no phone and no interest. The code is a bonus for those who want more, rather than the entire content.
This is why we sell engraving as an addition at £14.99 and why we would rather you bought it than not. It is also a resilience argument rather than a decorative one, and it matters especially in the many British cemeteries with no mobile coverage, as covered in do memorial QR codes work without signal.
Which to choose
Plain engraved plaque, if: you want something that needs nobody and nothing; the family will not realistically fill a page; nobody wants to manage it; the budget is tight; or a code would simply spoil the memorial for you.
Add the code, if: there is a great deal you want to record and nowhere to put it; the family is scattered and most will never stand at the grave; you have recordings of a voice; or you have looked at a plaque and felt that it said almost nothing about the person.
Both, if you can. Which is nearly everybody, and costs about £15 more than the code alone.
Whichever you choose, get the wording right
Engraving is permanent and errors are expensive. Check the dates against the death certificate rather than memory, have somebody outside the family proofread it, and think about whether a spouse may later share the memorial, because leaving room costs nothing now and a great deal later.
Openings, closings, short epitaphs and the mistakes that cannot be undone are all in what to write on a memorial plaque. And if the plaque is for a bench, the wording conventions are warmer and looser than for a grave, which is covered in the memorial bench guide.
Ours is 80mm brushed steel or brushed black, with the code engraved into the metal rather than printed on it, at £70 including the page. That is one payment with no subscription, and the page stays up for as long as The Life Behind is trading. Since the table above is honest that a code depends on a company existing, so are we: if we ever stopped, our terms of service commit us to at least 90 days' notice by email and a full download of everything on the page, and you can download the lot yourself at any time in any case. If you want to see how that sits against everyone else, the field is in memorial QR code companies compared.