How Much Does a QR Code Headstone Cost?

A QR code headstone plaque costs between $29 and $275 as a one-time purchase, and most families pay $40 to $100. Hosting for the memorial page is either included, prepaid for a fixed term, or billed yearly at around $30 to $60. Over twenty years a plaque with yearly hosting can pass $700, while a plaque with hosting included stays at its purchase price.

Updated July 27, 2026 · Written and checked by the Lumestone team

Cost is usually the second question families ask about a QR memorial, and it is harder to answer than it should be, because the market prices two different things at once. There is the plaque, which is a physical object with an obvious price. And there is the memorial page, which is a service somebody has to keep running, priced in four incompatible ways across the industry.

This guide gives you both, with every figure sourced. Prices were read from each company's own website on July 27, 2026, in US dollars. They change, and you should check before buying.

We sell one of the products discussed here, so we have put our own twenty-year number in the table alongside everyone else's rather than leaving it out. It is not the lowest number on the page.

The short answer

A QR code plaque for a headstone costs between $29 and $275 to buy, once. The wide spread reflects the metal it is cut from and the hosting arrangement bundled behind it, not the code itself, which costs nothing to generate.

Most families land between $40 and $100. Below that you are generally buying a tile with less said about what happens to the page. Above it you are usually buying stainless steel or a long prepaid hosting term.

Then there is the page. Some providers include hosting with no further charge, some prepay a fixed number of years, some sell software tiers once, and some bill yearly. That choice, not the plaque price, is what determines what this costs you in 2046.

It is worth being clear about what the plaque price is not buying. Generating a QR code is free and always has been. Engraving a small metal tile is inexpensive at volume. What you are really paying for is the metal, the engraving quality, the adhesive, the shipping, and above all whatever obligation the company is taking on for the page behind the code. A $29 tile and a $250 tile do not differ by $221 worth of aluminum.

What the plaques actually cost

Multi-packs are worth noticing if you want a plaque at the grave and another on an urn or keepsake at home. Turning Hearts at $79.99 for two works out at about $40 each, and Lumestone matches that at $79.99 for two, about $40 each against $47.99 for a single. A fuller feature-by-feature review sits in our guide to the best QR code memorial plaques.

How hosting is charged

Included with the purchase. Scan2Remember markets lifetime digital hosting under the line always free, always yours. Turning Hearts states no monthly fees. The question to ask is what funds the servers in year twenty, and what the media limits are: Scan2Remember's own product FAQ puts the free page at up to 10 photos and 3 videos, and its pricing page puts it lower still at 5 photos and no video, with unlimited media on a Plus tier at $9.90 a month, or $6.90 a month billed annually. Lumestone is in this group as well: hosting, daily backups, unlimited photo and video storage and the ad-free page are covered by the $47.99 plaque price, with nothing billed afterwards and nothing charged per plaque or per page. The question about year twenty applies to us too, and we answer it further down.

Prepaid for a fixed term. Life's QR sells 35 years of hosting prepaid at $250. Our Tributes states a minimum 50-year page hosting guarantee through its Legacy Assurance Program, included with the $99.99 plaque, alongside lifelong storage of up to 50 photos and unlimited videos embedded from YouTube or Vimeo. A stated term is the most checkable promise in this market, because it has a number in it.

One-time software tiers. Keeper says no subscription is required, with the plaque listed from $59 and software at $0, $99 or $350, each paid once.

Yearly subscription. LegacyMarker offers a free tier with Premium at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. Memorial QR charges $4.99 a month for each memorial and it is mandatory, which is $59.88 a year per person memorialized. The two things to establish here are whether the fee is charged per order or per memorial, and what happens to the page on the day a payment fails.

Total cost over 5, 10 and 20 years

This is the table most comparisons leave out. All figures assume one memorial for one person, at the tier described, with prices held at their July 2026 level.

Read the bottom two rows carefully, because they are the only ones whose number keeps moving. LegacyMarker's plaque plus Premium reaches $728.80 over twenty years and Memorial QR's mandatory hosting reaches $1,197.60, against $49.90 for Scan2Remember and $47.99 for us. What separates the top of that table from the bottom is the hosting model, not the plaque.

Two honest qualifications sit alongside it. The Scan2Remember figure holds only while you stay inside its free tier's media limits, which its own pages put at somewhere between 5 and 10 photos. A family with four hundred photographs needs its Plus tier, and at $82.80 a year billed annually that is $1,705.90 over twenty years once the plaque is counted. And Memorial QR shows what happens when a yearly fee is charged per memorial rather than per order, which for two people would be $2,395 over twenty years.

A third qualification cuts the other way, and it now applies to us as much as to anybody. Every flat row in that table, ours included, assumes the company is still trading in 2046 and still choosing to host your page for nothing further. That is an assumption, not a contract, and the table cannot price it. A twenty-year total of $49.90 or $47.99 is only meaningful if the twenty years actually happen, and this market has already produced services that took a one-time payment and closed. What we will put in writing is narrower than forever: a memorial is never deleted for non-payment, because there is no payment to miss, and if we ever had to stop operating you would get long notice and a full export of every photo, video and word you uploaded. Ask every provider on this list for those two things in writing.

If you are memorializing two people, run the arithmetic again before deciding. Two Our Tributes plaques are $199.98 and stay there. Two Lumestone plaques on one order are $79.99, and since nothing is charged for hosting on either page, that is the twenty-year figure too. Two Memorial QR memorials are $9.98 a month. The per-order versus per-memorial distinction changes the ranking entirely at that point.

Compared with headstone engraving

The alternative to a QR plaque is not nothing. It is cutting more words into granite, and that is where these numbers belong. The published estimates disagree with each other, which is itself informative.

Sources: Funeral Circle, Markers and Headstones and Memorials.com.

Why the disagreement? Method is the largest factor: sandblasting through a rubber stencil, laser etching and hand-cut lettering carry very different labor. Region matters, since a monument yard in a high-cost metropolitan area charges differently from a rural one. Stone hardness matters, because dark granites cut differently from marble. And minimum charges distort everything at the small end, which is why adding two digits to an existing stone can cost $300: you are paying for a technician, a van and a day, not for two numerals.

Two more figures belong here. Funeral Circle puts cemetery on-site charges at $100 to $250 and headstone installation at $200 to $850. And in the original Living Headstone program in 2011, Quiring Monuments in Seattle charged $65 to add a QR code to a headstone a family already owned (The Seattle Times).

Against that background, even the highest twenty-year total in the table above sits inside the range quoted for a single engraving job, and the engraving cannot be edited afterwards. The comparison is set out further in QR memorial plaque versus engraved plaque.

What drives the price

• Material. Bronze and stainless cost more than anodized aluminum, and last longer. Farewelling gives anodized aluminum medallions 10 to 15 years and stainless 25 or more (Farewelling).
• Size. Life's QR charges $250 at 2 by 2 inches and $275 at 4 by 4.
• What the page can hold. Unlimited uploaded video is a genuinely larger cost to provide than embedded YouTube links, and pricing reflects it.
• The hosting term being sold. A 35-year prepaid commitment has to be priced into the plaque.
• Protection plans. Beyond This Stone sells a 10-year replacement warranty at $9.99. Lumestone offers optional theft & damage protection giving free replacement for life.

Hidden costs to watch for

Unpublished upgrade prices are the main one. Two providers here gate unlimited media behind a paid tier whose price is not on the site, which makes an honest comparison impossible until after you have bought.

Per-memorial rather than per-order pricing is the second. A family memorializing both parents pays twice under that model. Lumestone charges nothing for hosting either way, so a second plaque and a second page add nothing recurring.

Then the practical ones. Shipping, where Scan2Remember is free at 8 to 13 business days and Lumestone ships worldwide within 48 hours for a flat $4.90, however many plaques are in the order. Cemetery permission fees, which some grounds charge for any alteration. And return windows, which vary from 7 days at Scan2Remember to no stated limit at Our Tributes, with Lumestone at 30 days.

Return windows deserve a moment on their own, because of when these purchases happen. A great many are made in the first fortnight after a funeral, by someone who is not thinking clearly and who may change their mind about the whole idea a month later. A 7-day window closes before that reconsideration arrives. Our Tributes offering free returns with no stated time limit is the most humane policy in the market on this point, and it is better than ours.

Replacement policies are the other thing worth pricing. A plaque on a public grave can be prised off, and adhesive on a rough stone can fail. Beyond This Stone sells a 10-year replacement warranty for $9.99, Turning Hearts states a lifetime warranty, and Our Tributes guarantees the plaque itself for 100 years. Lumestone includes a lifetime scan guarantee, meaning a free replacement if the plaque ever stops scanning, with theft & damage protection available separately for free replacement for life.

Who pays to keep the page online?

Start with the part nobody disputes. A memorial page is not a file you bought; it is a service that consumes storage, bandwidth, backups, security patching, a domain renewal and somebody to answer the phone, every year, indefinitely. That cost is real and it recurs whether or not a family is ever billed for it. The only question is who absorbs it.

A yearly fee is one answer, and it is a legitimate one: the money arrives every year, in step with the cost. It is also a liability, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest, because a card expires, a family member dies, nobody notices the email, and a page lapses at the worst possible moment. A one-time price is the other answer, and its weakness is the mirror image: the money arrives once, so the page is carried by a business that has to stay healthy without any further revenue from you.

We charge once. The plaque is $47.99, and hosting, daily backups, unlimited photo and video storage, the ad-free page and every future improvement come with it. There is no subscription, no yearly fee, nothing charged per plaque or per page, and nothing that can lapse because a card expired. We carry the running cost out of the margin on the plaque rather than billing a grieving family again every year. That is a deliberate choice about who carries the cost, not a favor.

What we will not do is call that forever. Plenty of services have used the word and closed anyway. Two things we will state plainly instead: a memorial is never deleted for non-payment, because there is no payment to miss; and if Lumestone ever had to stop operating, customers would get long notice and a full export of every photo, video and word they uploaded, rather than a dead link one morning. We have been running since 2023 and have served more than 2,500 families, which is a record rather than a guarantee.

There is one more thing worth doing, and it costs nothing. Whatever you buy, download a copy of the photographs and the written story once a year and keep it on a hard drive or a memory stick with the family papers. No hosting arrangement, ours included, is a substitute for a copy you physically hold.

Neither model guarantees permanence, and anybody claiming otherwise is selling. The most useful thing you can do is read what happens if a memorial website shuts down before you choose, and then ask your shortlisted provider the questions it raises.

How to spend less

Buy a multi-pack if you want more than one plaque, because per-unit prices drop sharply. Check whether hosting is priced per order or per memorial before assuming a subscription is expensive; for two parents it can be the cheaper option.

Count your photographs before comparing free tiers. If you have thirty, several included tiers cost you nothing extra. If you have four hundred, price the upgrade first, and ask for that number in writing before you order rather than after.

Skip the larger plaque unless you have a reason for it. A two-inch code scans perfectly well from standing height, and the four-inch versions cost more without reading any better on a headstone.

Fit the plaque yourself. Adhesive mounting takes a minute and needs no mason, and our guide to adding a QR code to an existing headstone covers it step by step. Ask the cemetery before ordering, since a refusal after purchase is the most avoidable cost of all, and cemetery rules for QR code headstones explains what to ask.

And weigh it against the engraving quote you would otherwise be getting. On the published figures, adding a single date to an existing stone starts around $200, and a QR plaque that holds a thousand photographs starts at $29. You can see what ours includes on the Lumestone plaque page.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides