Reading the free option honestly
What free cemetery software costs
There are genuinely free options in this category and a small cemetery is right to look at them. Free is a price on one line of the bill, though, and it is worth knowing where the others are.
Written by Thomas Sims, who makes Sexton
If your association has a budget under a hundred thousand dollars a year, a free tier is not a trivial thing to pass up, and anybody who tells you to ignore it is selling something. So this page is written to help you evaluate one properly rather than to talk you out of it.
Four questions decide whether a free option is genuinely free for your cemetery.
1. Is the mapping included?
This is the big one, and it is where most of the money in this category actually sits. A free tier that gives you records but charges for the map is a free tier with a four-figure or five-figure invoice attached, because professional cemetery mapping is generally billed per acre. Six acres at a typical per-acre rate is several thousand dollars, and that bill arrives before you have used the free software in earnest.
Ask: is the map included at this price, and if not, what is the per-acre rate and how many acres do you make us?
2. What are the limits, and where is the next tier?
Free tiers are shaped to become paid tiers. The common limits are the number of records, the number of users, whether you can export, whether there is a public search page, and whether anyone answers the phone. None of those are unreasonable — but find out where the ceiling is and what happens when you reach it, because reaching it in year three with eight thousand records typed in is a different negotiation from reading about it now.
Ask: what are the limits, what does the tier above cost, and how many of our records fit in the free one?
3. Can you get your records back out?
The single most important question, for free and paid alike. If the answer is that export is a paid feature, or a support request, or not offered, then the cost of the free tier is that your register is somewhere you cannot fully retrieve it from — and a cemetery register is not a thing to hold on those terms.
Ask: can we export everything ourselves, today, without paying, and what format does it come out in?
4. What is the business behind it?
Free tiers are offered for a reason, and the reasons are all legitimate: a way into paid tiers, a way to sell digitisation services, a nonprofit or grant-funded project, or a genealogy-facing business that benefits from more records existing. Knowing which one you are dealing with tells you what happens in five years. A free tier that exists to sell a service is stable as long as the service sells; a free tier that is somebody’s side project is stable as long as they are interested.
Ask: how is this funded, and what is the plan for it?
The spreadsheet is also free, and it is a real option
Worth saying, since it is what most small cemeteries actually use. A spreadsheet costs nothing, opens anywhere, and works offline. What it does not do is hold a map that agrees with the ground, keep ownership and burials answerable in both directions, or stop two people editing two copies. Those are the specific things that break it, set out in cemetery record keeping.
What we do instead
Sexton has no free tier. $750 a year includes your first cemetery, plus $50 a year for each additional cemetery your organization owns. Every feature is included, with no setup fee and no mapping bill. There are no tiers to be moved between, no per-person charge as the board turns over, and no limit on records.
The demonstration is free and unlimited, though, and it is the whole program with sample records rather than a cut-down version — you can decide what you think before anyone asks you for anything. If it is not right for your cemetery, no harm done: open the demonstration and see, or read what Sexton does first.