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A Free Tukios Alternative for Independent Funeral Homes

Updated November 11, 2026 · For the funeral director who is tired of the renewal quote

I am not going to write the usual thing about a competitor, the one where the other company is a villain and the new one is a hero. You have read that page before, and you did not believe it. Tukios is a real company with a real product, and a good number of chapels are well served by it. The honest question is narrower than “which one is best.” It is this: which part of the monthly bundle do you actually use, and are you paying for the rest?

This page is written for the person who signs the invoice, not for a software sales desk. What follows is a fair reading of what Tukios does well, where its pricing shape starts to hurt an independent chapel, and where a $0 website with a 60 second WhatsApp obituary fits if you decide you want one.

What Tukios genuinely does well

Start with the part their reputation is built on, because it is earned. Tukios came up on tribute video, and the videos are good. The slideshow, the licensed music, the transitions that do not look like a wedding montage from 2008, the chapel branding at the front and the end. A family who sees one of those played before a service usually asks for the file, and often asks for a copy for the house. That is the product doing its job.

The company also understands that most funeral directors do not want to become editors. Send the photographs, choose the music, let someone else assemble the thing and send it back in time for the viewing. For a chapel with a steady package that includes a tribute video, or a chapel whose staff would rather phone a person than read a help center, that support model is worth money. It is not a trick, and it is not a rip off.

Beyond video, Tukios also sells a funeral home website and marketing services, and scores of chapels use that side of the house happily. The company is old enough to have a support desk that answers, and long enough in the market that your neighboring funeral home probably uses it too. Stability has value when the alternative is a stranger with a newer website. If you are going to compare, compare against a company that has actually been around, and Tukios is one.

Where the monthly suite model strains an independent chapel

The strain is not in the quality. It is in the shape of the deal. Tukios sells a suite on a monthly subscription, sized by how many homes you operate and quoted to your volume. That is normal for the industry, and it makes sense for a larger operation with a merchandising room, a print program, and staff who touch the system every day.

At a chapel doing a modest number of calls, the arithmetic of a suite gets awkward. You renew the whole bundle every month whether or not a family asked for a video that month. The website line and the marketing line keep renewing through a quiet January. Because the price arrives as one number, you cannot see what each piece costs, so you cannot drop the piece you never open. You end up paying for capability rather than use, and the invoice looks the same in a month with two arrangements as in a month with twelve.

The second strain is time, and it lands in the arrangement conference. In a subscription model, the website is usually yours to feed. Somebody at the chapel logs in, types the obituary into a form, uploads the portrait, checks the service times, and remembers to publish. When the person who normally does that is at a graveside service or on vacation, the obituary waits. Families do not wait well. They send the link to relatives the same evening, and if the page is not there, they call the chapel to ask why.

The third strain is the renewal itself. Subscription agreements in this industry often run on annual terms, with auto renewal and a notice window before the rate changes. The number you agreed to in your first year is a promotional number in many cases. Ask what the invoice will be in two years, ask whether the agreement renews on its own, and read the line that covers a second location or a chapel you acquire. None of that is unique to Tukios. It is how the category prices, and it is why directors who are otherwise content still flinch when the renewal email arrives.

None of this means the suite is wrong for you. It means you should be able to say, in one sentence, which parts of it you use. If you cannot, you are paying for a bundle and calling it a website.

The two offers side by side

Here is the comparison in the plainest form I can put it, with the caveat that Tukios prices by quote, so the numbers are not published as a rate card. What I can describe is the shape of each offer.

Read that table as an invitation to check us both. The Tukios column is deliberately generous, because the product deserves it. Ask their salesperson to correct anything I have described wrong, and ask them the same questions in the next section.

What $0 per month actually includes

Be clear about the words. Free means the chapel pays no monthly fee for the website and the obituary wall. The public offer is $0 per month, with the first three family Memory Gardens and one sample 316 stainless steel QR medallion included at no charge. There is no setup fee, no hosting fee, and no per obituary charge.

The site itself is built for a grieving family on a phone with two bars of signal. The header has the chapel name, the town, and a care line a thumb can dial. The hero offers the current services wall and a Waze directions button so nobody retypes an address. The wall shows only real services with real names, a live count, and a search field, so an out of town niece can find the right card in a few keystrokes. Each family garden holds candles and voice memories, and guests need no password. Local funeral home structured data carries your name, address, and phone number, so search engines read the essentials correctly.

And here is what it is not, said as plainly as the other side. It is not a case management system, so Passare or Frazer keeps the arrangement room work. It does not prepare death certificates or preneed trust paperwork. It is not a casket catalog, a florist, or a stationery printer. The sample medallion is one, and extra medallions are a separate order. It will not outrank a chapel that has stood on the same corner for forty years with a clean Google Business Profile. It does not edit your tribute videos.

If you want the longer version of that list, with the General Price List question and the local search checklist, it lives on the guide to a free funeral home website and 60 second obituary software.

The 60 second WhatsApp obituary, in six steps

1. Open WhatsApp on the chapel phone and message the assistant contact that comes with the portal, or send a text if that suits your desk.
2. Send the full name as it should appear, the birth and death dates, the service times, the place, the visitation hours, the portrait, and one sentence about the person if the family offered one.
3. About a minute later you get a live obituary on your own site, a share link, and a printable QR standee for the register book or the chapel door.
4. Read the dates back to the family before you hand over the link. You are the editor and your name is on the page.
5. Tell the family what the page is, in one sentence, a permanent place where relatives light a candle and record a voice memory.
6. Leave the garden in place after the service, and keep the standee readable for the anniversary.

No app install, no CMS training, no password to forget on a Saturday. If you leave out the place of service, the assistant asks for it instead of publishing a page with a blank line. That is the whole point. The person sitting with a grieving family should not have to leave the table to put a name on the internet.

The question nobody asks at the renewal meeting

If you leave a vendor, who keeps the obituary pages? In most subscription models the answer is not obvious, and it is worth knowing before you sign rather than after. Ask whether the pages live on your domain or theirs, whether you can export the text and photographs as a file, and what a family sees if you move. If the answer is that every link a family saved stops working, that is a real cost, even if it never appears on an invoice.

The same question applies to us. The chapel keeps its domain, its phone number, and its name on the page. That is the offer, and it should be written down.

Who should stay with Tukios

If your families routinely buy a tribute video as part of the package, if your staff lean on the support desk, and if your website feeds off the same account without anyone complaining, then the suite is doing its job and I would not move it to save a line item. Changing a system that works costs more in attention than it saves in fees, and a funeral home has no attention to spare.

If you use the video a few times a month and the website is the only other piece you touch, the sensible move may be a split. Keep the video service, because the craft is good and your families expect it. Move the website and the obituary wall to something that costs nothing monthly, and put the arrangement conference back in the room where the family is sitting. That is not a war between vendors. It is a chapel deciding which parts of a bundle it wants.

Run it on your next three families

Pick the next three arrangements that come through the door, not the easiest and not the hardest. Include the garden and the medallion at no cost, and tell each family in one sentence what it is while you are already talking about the folder and the register book. Then watch after the service. Count who forwards the link, count the cousins who light a candle, notice which family asks about a second medallion. Those signals decide whether this belongs on your General Price List, and they come from families rather than a demo.

No contract, no change to your price list, no monthly fee starting on a date you did not choose. Three families, then a decision you make yourself.