Is Ever Loved Free? What Costs Nothing, What Costs Money, and Where the Fees Sit

Yes. Ever Loved's memorial pages are free, and they do not hit a paywall later. You can create a page, publish an obituary, collect messages, share the link, and never enter a card. The pages do not carry advertising either, which is not true of every free memorial site.

That is the whole answer to the question as most people ask it. What follows is the part that actually costs people money — because Ever Loved does take money, just not for the thing you were asking about.

What Costs Nothing

Free	Notes
Creating a memorial page	No card required, no trial clock
Publishing an obituary on the page	Different from a newspaper obituary — see below
Guest messages and condolences	Unlimited
Uploading photos	Basic gallery
Funeral and service details, RSVPs	The planning side of the product
Browsing funeral-home prices	Their price directory is free to read
Keeping the page up	No renewal, no expiry date advertised

If your entire need is "somewhere to put the details and let people leave a message before Saturday", Ever Loved does that for nothing and does it well. Nothing on this site's comparison of free memorial websites beats free-and-no-ads.

Where the Money Actually Is

Ever Loved is a business, and it earns in places adjacent to the free page. None of these are traps — they are all opt-in — but they are what people mean when they come back and say "I thought it was free."

1. The fundraiser fee. This is the big one, and it catches families out because the cost never appears as a bill. If you raise money for funeral costs through Ever Loved, a percentage is taken from the donations before they reach you, along with the payment processor's own cut. You do not pay it; your donors' money does. It is standard for the whole category — every funeral-fundraising platform works this way — but if you are raising $9,000, the difference between one platform's rate and another's is real money at the worst possible time.

Check the current rate on the donation page itself before you launch the fundraiser, not in an article. These percentages change, and there is often a difference between the platform's own fee and processing fees, plus an optional donor tip that some donors do not realise is optional.

2. Printed things. Programs, prayer cards, memorial stationery. Straightforwardly optional, priced per order.

3. Newspaper obituaries. If you place an obituary in an actual newspaper through any partner or directory, the newspaper charges for it — often several hundred dollars for a photo and a few column inches. This is the single most common source of confusion across every memorial platform, so it is worth being blunt: the website is free; the newspaper is not. The two things are not the same product, and one being free tells you nothing about the other.

4. Funeral-home referrals. The price-comparison directory is free to you because it sits between families and funeral homes. That is a normal business model, and it does not make the price data useless — but it is worth knowing the directory is not a disinterested party.

The Cost That Isn't Money

There is a second question hiding inside "is it free", and it is the one that actually decides things two years later: what is the page for?

Ever Loved is built around the fortnight surrounding a funeral. Service details, RSVPs, the fundraiser, the obituary, the first wave of messages. Inside that window it is excellent, and free is exactly the right price.

What it is not built for is the page growing. The layout looks the same whether the memorial holds four photos or four hundred. There is no real path for a scattered family to each add their own material from their own phone over years — the cousin who finds a box of slides in 2028, the grandchild who records a story at Thanksgiving. We went through this in detail in Ever Loved alternatives, including how to move a memorial across without losing the tributes.

So the honest framing is not "free versus paid". It is:

• Need the funeral fortnight handled? Ever Loved, free, and you are done.
• Need a page that is still gaining photos and stories in ten years? That is a different product, and some of those are also free — with different trade-offs.

Plenty of families use both, and link one to the other. That is a perfectly sensible arrangement and costs nothing extra.

How It Compares on Price

	Memorial page	Ads on the page	Where they earn
Ever Loved	Free, no paywall	No	Fundraiser fee, printed goods, funeral-home referrals
GetMemorial ⭐	Free tier, no ads	No	One-time lifetime plan for the full version
ForeverMissed	Free tier, limited	On free pages historically	Subscription or lifetime plan
Legacy.com	Obituary via newspaper	Yes	Newspaper placement fees, guest-book add-ons
Facebook memorial	Free	Yes	Advertising

GetMemorial is ours, so treat that row accordingly — it is here because leaving it out of our own comparison table would be worse. We charge once for a lifetime plan rather than monthly, and we do not do fundraising, funeral RSVPs, newspaper obituary placement, or anniversary reminders. If any of those are what you need this month, Ever Loved is the better tool and it costs you nothing.

For the full arithmetic across platforms over ten years, the memorial website cost comparison does the sums, and Ever Loved vs Legacy vs GetMemorial sets the three side by side on features rather than price.

Three Things Worth Checking Before You Commit

Not specific to Ever Loved — ask these of any free memorial site, including ours.

1. What happens if the company shuts down or is acquired? Free hosting has no contract behind it. The practical protection is not a promise on a website; it is keeping your own copy of the photos and the text somewhere you control.
2. Can you export what you put in? Tributes people wrote in the first week are irreplaceable and are usually the hardest thing to get back out. Copy them into a document early. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single best insurance available.
3. Who is the page for in five years? If the answer is "the family, still adding to it", check that the free tier is designed for that and not just for the first fortnight.

Common Questions

Is Ever Loved really free, or is there a catch? It is genuinely free for the memorial page, with no ads and no paywall. The revenue comes from the fundraiser fee, printed programs, and funeral-home referrals — all optional, none of which affect the page itself.

Does Ever Loved charge a fee on donations? Yes. A platform fee plus payment processing is deducted from funds raised, which is normal for the category. Check the exact current percentages on the donation setup page before launching, because these change and the difference matters on a five-figure total.

Is the Ever Loved obituary the same as a newspaper obituary? No. Publishing an obituary on the Ever Loved page costs nothing. Placing one in a newspaper is a separate transaction with the newspaper, and it is not cheap. Do not assume the free one substitutes for the paid one if the family expects a printed notice.

How long does an Ever Loved memorial page stay up? There is no advertised expiry, and the pages have remained up. That is a track record rather than a guarantee — for anything you cannot bear to lose, keep your own copy regardless of which platform you use.

Is Ever Loved legit? Yes — a real, established US company, and the free memorial page is exactly what it appears to be. The part that deserves care is whether a specific fundraiser is genuine, which no platform can verify for you; we go through how to check that here.

Can I move my Ever Loved memorial somewhere else later? Yes, manually. There is no export-and-import between memorial platforms, so it means copying the text and re-uploading photos. The step-by-step is here, including what only Ever Loved holds and is worth screenshotting first.

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GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes — a permanent home for tributes, photos, and stories. Build yours at GetMemorial.com.