You can have an online memorial page for nothing. MuchLoved is a registered charity, number 1118590, and their pages are free for as long as you want them. They work with thousands of funeral directors and charities, and in-memory fundraising is a large part of what they do.
We sell a plaque for £70. So this article has an obvious problem, and the only way to write it honestly is to start with the conclusion.
If what you want is a memorial page, use a free one. Not as a compromise. Because it is the right tool and it costs nothing.
What follows is about the narrower question of what free does not do, and whether that gap is worth anything to you. For a good many families it is not, and we would rather say so here than take £70 off somebody who did not need to spend it.
What a free page gives you
A place on the internet with photographs, a life story, a guestbook, candles and tributes from people who knew them. Editable whenever you like. Shareable by a link. Often connected to charitable giving, which matters to a lot of families and is something we do not offer at all.
And in the case of a charity-run platform, a funding model that is arguably more durable than ours. A charity with thousands of institutional partners is not obviously more likely to disappear than a small company. That point cuts against us and it should be said plainly.
The three things free does not give you
1. Nothing exists at the graveside
This is the whole difference, and everything else is detail.
A free memorial page is found by people who already have the link. It is shared in the weeks after a death, when everybody is paying attention, and then it settles into an email somewhere.
A plaque is found by whoever is standing in front of the memorial. A grandchild in fifteen years. A cousin who came to tend the grave. A stranger who reads the name and wonders. Nobody has to have been told the page exists, and nobody has to still have the message.
The link between a physical place and the page is the thing you are paying for. Not the page.
2. A link is a fragile way to remember something
Ask yourself, honestly, where the link to a free page will be in twenty years. In a WhatsApp group that has long since gone quiet. On a phone that was replaced twice. In an email account nobody has the password to since the person who set it up died.
Something screwed to a headstone does not have that failure mode.
3. Free is a funding model, and models change
This is not a criticism of MuchLoved, whose charitable status is exactly what makes it credible. It is a general caution about free memorial sites, which are not all the same.
Somebody pays for storage. If it is not you and it is not a charity, then it is usually advertising, or an upgrade tier that appears later, or an eventual owner who bought the business and takes a different view. Before you commit years of photographs to any free service, look for who is paying, and check that you can get everything back out again as ordinary files.
Where a page is supported by advertising, be clear about what that means: adverts beside your photographs of them. Some people mind that enormously and some do not mind at all.
The middle route nobody sells you
Since we are being honest, here is the cheaper option that competes with our own product.
Build a free memorial page. Then buy a plain engraved metal tag from a marketplace maker for £5 to £15, with the page's address marked into it, and fix that to the memorial. You get the physical marker and the free page, for under £20.
This genuinely works, and if the budget is tight it is what we would do. Three things to be careful of.
- Get it engraved, not printed. A printed code fades in a couple of British winters and then it is a blank square. See the durability guide.
- The address is burned in permanently. If the free service ever changes its web addresses, or closes, the tag points at nothing and cannot be redirected. This is the static code problem, and it is explained in how memorial QR codes work.
- Download everything, once a year. Onto your own computer, as ordinary files. This is good advice with any supplier, ours included.
What £70 buys that free does not
Set out plainly, so you can decide whether it is worth it to you.
- An 80mm plaque in brushed steel or brushed black, made for permanent outdoor use, with the code engraved into the metal rather than printed on it, and a weatherproof backing.
- The memory page included for as long as The Life Behind is trading. No subscription, no renewal fee, nothing to renew and nothing further to pay at any point.
- A code that can be pointed somewhere else if it ever needs to be, so the plaque does not become decoration.
- Room for 1,000 photographs, 30 minutes of video and 30 minutes of voice, published as real figures.
- A private setting, where a visitor sees only a name, dates and a portrait until you let them in, and where nothing anybody adds appears until you have seen it. The page is never listed and never appears in search results.
- No advertising, ever.
- Everything downloadable at any time, as ordinary files.
- Terms of service that say what happens if we stop trading: at least 90 days' notice by email, and a full download of everything on the page, before anything goes offline. So what you build is never held only by us.
- A free replacement plaque if it fades, rusts, corrodes or lifts off in normal outdoor use, for as long as we are trading, on nothing more than an order number.
- Somebody to email when it stops working in nine years' time.
How to decide
Use a free page if you want somewhere for the family to gather photographs and tributes, you are raising money for a charity in their name, there is no grave or physical memorial to mark, or money is tight and you would rather have the page than the metal.
Buy a plaque if there is a headstone, bench, urn or tree that people visit, you want it to be found by someone who was never sent a link, or the page holds recordings and photographs that exist nowhere else and you would rather deal with somebody who has written down what happens to it if the business ends.
Do both if you want the charitable fundraising a free platform offers and a marker at the graveside as well. They are not in competition, and nobody should tell you they are.
Ours is the memorial plaque with memory page. If you would rather see how it sits against the paid alternatives before deciding anything, there is a full table in memorial QR code companies compared. And if you have decided on a page of some kind but do not know what to put on it, building a digital memorial page covers that whichever route you take.
Details about MuchLoved were taken from their public website on 27 August 2026. Prices and terms change. If anything here is out of date or unfair, email support@thelifebehind.com and we will correct it.