Keeper Memorials Review: What the Free Plan Actually Gives You

Disclosure first, because it matters here. GetMemorial is an online memorial platform. Keeper is a competitor. We have tried to write this the way we would want a competitor to write about us — naming the things Keeper does better than we do, and being specific about the limits rather than vague about them. Read the last section if you want to know where we think each of us actually wins.

Keeper Memorials has been around since 2013, which makes it one of the older platforms still actively shipping. It is also the hardest one to summarise in a sentence, because it is really three products stitched together: an online memorial page, a family tree, and a cemetery navigation app that will walk you to a specific grave. Most people arrive looking for the first and have no idea the other two exist.

This is what you actually get, at each price.

The Free Plan: One Page, Five Files

Keeper Basic costs nothing and includes a genuine feature set — not a stripped demo. On the free tier you get:

• One memorial page, with a custom URL
• Up to 5 photos and videos, total
• Guest book and tributes
• Invited contributors, so family can add their own memories
• Privacy controls
• Family tree
• Memorial event pages
• An AI obituary assistant
• Content moderation

That list is more generous than most free tiers on paper. The family tree and the AI obituary assistant are both included at $0, which is unusual — plenty of platforms hold one or both behind a paywall.

But read the second line again. Five photos and videos is the whole allowance, not five per album. For most families that is a wall you hit on the first evening. The typical memorial-building session starts with someone opening a shoebox or a phone camera roll and uploading forty pictures. On Keeper Basic you upload five and then decide which five.

This is a legitimate design choice, not a trick — Keeper is upfront about the number, and hosting video is genuinely expensive. But it does mean the free plan is best understood as a placeholder: a permanent URL, a guest book that works, and a handful of images, held open until you decide whether to pay. It is not a free memorial in the sense that Ever Loved or MuchLoved are free, where the photo allowance is not the constraint.

Keeper Plus: $99, Once

Keeper Plus is a one-time payment of $99 USD. No renewal, no annual bill. It lifts the two limits that matter:

• Unlimited memorial pages — relevant if you are memorialising more than one person, or building out a family line
• Unlimited photos and videos

Everything else on the list is the same as the free tier. That is worth saying plainly, because it makes the decision simple: the only question is whether five files is enough. If it is, the free plan is complete. If it isn't, $99 is the whole price and there is nothing else to work out.

One-time pricing is the right model for a memorial and it is good to see it. A subscription on a memorial page is a card that eventually expires, on an account nobody remembers, attached to a page the family assumed was permanent. We compared what each platform costs over five years and one-time plans are the only structure where the five-year number and the one-year number are the same.

There is also Keeper Concierge at $350 one-time, which is Keeper Plus plus a person: a memorial specialist who helps with the writing, curates the photos, does custom design work, and meets you twice over video for thirty minutes. Whether that is worth $251 more depends entirely on whether the blank page is the problem. For a family that has three hundred photos and no idea where to start, having someone else do the sorting is a real service. For most people it is not necessary.

The Part Nobody Else Has: Cemeteries

This is where Keeper stops being comparable to other memorial websites.

Keeper's iOS and Android apps carry a database of cemetery records — over 150 million graves — and the app will give you walking directions to a specific grave inside a cemetery or mausoleum. If you have ever stood in a large cemetery with a section number and no idea which way to walk, you know why that exists.

The app does two more things in the same family:

• Photograph a monument and it will try to pull up the associated memorial
• Scan a QR code on a monument to open the tribute page

Keeper sells the QR plaques themselves, so the loop closes: a physical marker at the grave that anyone visiting can scan to read the life story. Keeper also sells cemetery kiosk software to cemeteries and funeral homes directly, which is where the grave database comes from and why it keeps growing.

If a cemetery is central to how your family remembers someone, no other memorial platform is close. Not Ever Loved, not Legacy.com, not us. That is the honest read, and it is the main reason to choose Keeper.

The related point: Keeper's memorial page and its family tree are the same object. Adding a grandparent as a node in the tree and writing their memorial are one action, not two. If you are the person in the family who has been slowly assembling a genealogy, that is a meaningful saving of effort.

Worth knowing: GatheringUs now operates as part of Keeper Memorials, and the memorial pages bundled with GatheringUs event packages are Keeper pages. If you are pricing a virtual service, that changes what you are actually buying.

Where People Get Frustrated

Keeper's public reviews are strongly positive — a 5-star Trustpilot average across a few hundred reviews, with most of the praise going to the support staff, who by all accounts are patient with families in a bad week. That is not nothing; a lot of software in this category has no human behind it at all.

The complaints cluster in three places, and they are consistent:

1. The free tier surprises people. Not because it is hidden, but because "free memorial page" sets an expectation that five files does not meet. Several reviewers describe uploading photos, hitting the cap, and only then reading the pricing page.

2. The admin side is not intuitive. Building and editing the page — as opposed to viewing it — is the part reviewers call clunky. This is a common shape for a platform that has been shipping since 2013: the newer features are good and the underlying editor carries a decade of accumulated decisions.

3. There is no way to organise photos into named albums. Everything lands in a single gallery. On a small memorial that is fine. On a memorial with two hundred images spanning sixty years, it means nobody can find "the wedding" without scrolling past everything else. This is the single most-requested change in the reviews.

None of these are dealbreakers. All three are worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

Keeper vs GetMemorial, Stated Plainly

	Keeper	GetMemorial
Free tier	1 page, 5 photos/videos	Yes, free tier
Paid plan	$99 one-time (Plus)	$89.99 one-time lifetime
Concierge option	$350 one-time	No
Native apps	iOS and Android	iOS; Android in development
Cemetery navigation	Yes — 150M+ graves	No
Family tree	Yes	No
QR grave markers	Yes, sold directly	No
Photo albums / folders	No	—
Languages	English	English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese

Choose Keeper if the grave is part of how you remember them, or if the memorial belongs inside a family tree you are already building. Those two features are genuinely unmatched, and $99 once is a fair price for them.

Choose us if you want to build and update the memorial from a phone and you care how it looks — that is what we optimised for, and it is a different bet. We do not do cemeteries, we do not do family trees, and we do not have an Android app yet. If any of those three is your reason for looking, Keeper is the better answer and you should stop reading here.

For the wider field — including the platforms that beat both of us on price — see our comparison of ten online memorial websites, or the app-by-app breakdown if you specifically want something installable.

FAQ

Is Keeper Memorials free? Yes, with limits. Keeper Basic costs $0 and includes one memorial page with a custom URL, a guest book, contributors, a family tree, and up to five photos and videos in total. The five-file cap is the practical constraint. Keeper Plus removes it for a one-time $99.

Does Keeper charge a subscription? No. Keeper Plus is a one-time $99 payment and Keeper Concierge is a one-time $350. There is no recurring bill to lapse.

Can I really find a specific grave with the Keeper app? That is the app's strongest feature. It carries records for over 150 million graves and gives directions within a cemetery or mausoleum. Coverage depends on whether that cemetery is in the database, so check yours before choosing Keeper for this reason alone.

What happens to my Keeper memorial if I never upgrade? The free page stays online. Keeper does not describe the free tier as time-limited; the limitation is the file count, not an expiry date.

Can I move a memorial from Keeper to another platform? There is no one-click export between memorial platforms — none of them offer it, including us. Moving means downloading your photos and copying the written tributes across by hand. Do it before you cancel anything, and save the guest book entries first, since those are the pieces family wrote and cannot be recreated.

Is Keeper the same company as GatheringUs? GatheringUs operates as part of Keeper Memorials. The event services still carry the GatheringUs name, and the memorial pages included in its packages are Keeper pages.

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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.