The Life Behind vs Digital Gravestones: The £2 a Month Question

We are one of the two companies in this comparison, so check anything you want to rely on. Everything below about Digital Gravestones was taken from their own website, including their published plans page, on 27 August 2026.

A note before anything else, because it matters and it is easy to get wrong. There are two similarly named businesses in this space at digital-gravestones.co.uk and digitalgravestones.co.uk. This article is about the first of those, the one with the membership plans. We have not written about the second and nothing here should be read as applying to it.

The short version

Checked 27 August 2026. The thirty-year figures assume their prices never rise, which is generous to them.

Where they beat us

You can try it for nothing. Sixty days, no card details required. That is a genuinely good offer and it is more than we do. A family who is not sure whether any of this is for them can find out at no cost and no risk, which is exactly the right way to sell something to people who are grieving. We have no equivalent and we think it is to their credit.

Their plaques start cheaper. £39 to £65 against our £70, and they offer ground stakes as well as plaques, which is useful where there is nothing to fix a plaque to.

You can cancel whenever you like. Some people genuinely prefer a small recurring cost they can stop to a larger one-off payment they cannot get back. That is a legitimate preference and it is the whole argument for their model.

The arithmetic

Now the part that we think decides it, and it is not hidden anywhere. Their plans are published clearly on their own website: £2 a month, £15 a year, or £65 once every five years, each described as keeping the memorial page up and running, cancellable at any time.

Take the yearly plan, which is the middle option and the one most people would choose.

• A £50 plaque, plus £15 a year for 10 years: £200
• The same, for 20 years: £350
• The same, for 30 years: £500

The five-year plan is slightly better value at £65 a time, which over thirty years is £390 plus the plaque, so about £440.

Ours is £70, once, with the page included and nothing further to pay.

So a £50 plaque and a £70 plaque cost the same by roughly the fourth year, and by the thirtieth the cheaper one has cost about seven times more. Nobody is concealing this. It is simply that almost nobody multiplies at the point of purchase, and a memorial is the one purchase where you should.

The same arithmetic across the whole trade is worked through in how much a QR code memorial costs in the UK.

The part that is not about money

If the argument were only about pounds it would be a weak one, because £2 a month is not a lot of money to most households and cancel-anytime is a real convenience.

The stronger argument is about what a recurring payment requires, for thirty years, from a family that will change completely in that time.

Somebody has to hold a card that has not expired, on an account still open, at a bank still trading, receiving emails at an address they still read. And they have to keep doing it long after the person who set it up has themselves died. For most memorials the person paying is the surviving spouse, and when they go, the card stops, the reminders go to an inbox nobody opens, and the page comes down.

Nobody is told. There is no letter. A headstone falling over is visible; a memorial page lapsing is not. The first anyone knows is a grandchild standing at a graveside years later, scanning a code, and getting nothing.

That is the case against a subscription on a memorial, and it holds at £2 a month exactly as it holds at £50 a year. The fee size changes the cost. It does not change the failure.

What we do instead, and where it is weaker

The page is included in the £70, so there is nothing to renew, nothing to remember and no card to expire. There is no subscription and no renewal fee at any later point, and the page stays up for as long as The Life Behind is trading.

Two places that is worse than their model, said plainly. You cannot try ours for free, and you pay in one go rather than in small amounts you could stop whenever you liked. We think that is the right trade for a memorial and we understand why somebody would disagree.

What we would say to anybody choosing either of us: you can download everything on our page at any time, as ordinary photograph and video files, so the material is yours whatever happens to us. And our terms of service say what happens if we ever have to stop trading, which is at least 90 days' notice by email and a full download of everything on the page before it goes offline. No supplier we have compared commits to anything of the sort. Ask any supplier the same question before you buy.

If you do go with a subscription, from anyone

Two things worth doing, and both are free.

Write the renewal into whatever your family already keeps. The will, the folder of important papers, the household password list. Name a second person who knows it exists and what it is for.

Download the whole page once a year. Photographs as files, writing as a document, on your own computer. This one habit protects you from every supplier in this trade, ours included, and it makes the difference between an inconvenience and a second loss.

Which to buy

Choose Digital Gravestones if you want to try the idea before committing anything, you would rather a small stoppable cost than a larger fixed one, or you need a ground stake rather than a plaque.

Choose us if you want it paid for and finished, with nothing for anyone to remember in 2044.

Ours is the memorial plaque with memory page at £70. The full field is in memorial QR code companies compared.

Details and prices above were taken from digital-gravestones.co.uk, including their published plans page, on 27 August 2026, and are quoted so that families can compare like with like. Prices and terms change. If anything here is out of date or unfair, email support@thelifebehind.com and we will correct it.