Forms filled. Family informed. Director home for dinner.
Vestamere is the operating system for independent funeral homes. Paperwork on autopilot, family-visible chain of custody, FTC-compliant pricing — so the hour you used to spend on EDRS is the hour you spend with the family in the room.
Built for the independents who choose tooling over selling. No data harvesting. No forced arbitration. Month-to-month.
Three problems Vestamere solves the day you turn it on.
Death certificate to EDRS, GPL on the fly, VA Form 21P-530EZ pre-filled, SSA notification, insurance assignment packet — all from one case record. State-aware: works in Colorado the same week it works in Florida.
“Funeral directors’ time is often eaten up by tasks like paperwork, scheduling, billing, and coordinating with vendors. These responsibilities can take over the day and keep them from focusing on what really matters — helping families.”
Barcode tag at intake, paired cremation tag at the retort, photo confirmation at every transfer. Audit log is visible to the family — not as a marketing screen, as the actual truth. The home that runs this never ends up in a headline.
“Where is his facial hair?” — a family member, on receiving the wrong body. Vestamere makes that sentence impossible.
Every family sees an itemized, live invoice. Every quote is hash-signed and surfaced again at time of need. Your website’s GPL auto-publishes on every change. FTC undercover shoppers find nothing to write down.
“Years after purchase, families were informed that an additional $6,000 was required for opening and closing of burial plots — an expense that had not been clearly disclosed.” Vestamere homes can’t accidentally do that.
The hour you save is the director you keep.
60% of US funeral directors plan to retire by 2028. Mortuary school enrollment is up 25% since 2020 — but homes can’t retain anyone past two years. The NFDA calls it a retention crisis, not a recruitment crisis. Compassion FS in Indiana runs a three-day work week now, because that’s what the math demands.
Vestamere doesn’t fix burnout. But every minute it saves a director on the EDRS form, on the insurance assignment, on the obituary copy-paste, is a minute the director isn’t spending on the thing that quietly drives them out. Add up the minutes. That’s the apprentice who renews her license. That’s the GM who doesn’t sell to Park Lawn.
of mortuary workers meet criteria for PTSD vs 1% general population.
cost of losing one mid-career director.
net margin per case — the existential math.
Not built for SCI. Not built like SCI.
SCI charges 72% more per cremation than the independent across the street. Their customers complain about $595 plastic trays, $5,000 surprise charges, four-month-stored remains, refunds that take five months and an Attorney General complaint to extract. Their preneed insurance pays back less than the premiums.
You can compete with that. You don’t have to become that.
Vestamere is the operating tooling that lets an 80-case independent run with the audit trail, the compliance backbone, and the family-trust surface of a hundred-location chain — without the chain pricing, the chain pressure, or the chain reviews. No roll-up sponsors, no preneed exclusivity, no carrier lock-in.
“There was comfort in my decision, largely because I never felt pressured to ‘sign on the dotted line.’”
Plays nicely with the stack you already have.
ASD answering service routes the 3am call into a Vestamere case stub with the caller’s details already entered. Memoriams pushes the obituary to the newspaper from one click. QuickBooks gets every line item without a manual export. Legacy.com obituary publishing without leaving the case record.
You don’t have to migrate everything on day one. Run Vestamere alongside what works.
Math that pays for Vestamere by the second case.
typical compression on insurance assignment with Vestamere’s funder integrations — roughly $5,000/year back in your account on a 200-case home.
incremental revenue from one additional Celebration of Life upsell per quarter — calm and packaged, not pushy.
maximum FTC penalty per violation, avoided by always-current GPL and audit-trailed pricing.
Vestamere annual cost: $1,000 (smallest homes) to $18,000 (multi-site) depending on case volume. Pays for itself many times over inside the first six months at any volume.
Honest pricing. Posted publicly. You pay for what you use.
Per-case billing with volume discount. Every feature is included at every volume — no “this is in the higher tier” surprises. Unlimited users, unlimited locations.
Floor for very small homes. Covers our support cost without punishing low volume.
Optional. Monthly is the default; we don’t lock you in.
Full features. No credit card. Cancel any month, refund of unused prepaid months.
What this means at typical volumes (annual prepay rates shown):
- 50-case home: ~$1,660/year (~$138/mo)
- 150-case home: ~$4,550/year (~$379/mo)
- 300-case home: ~$8,250/year (~$687/mo)
- 500-case home: ~$11,475/year (~$956/mo)
- 1000-case multi-site: ~$17,850/year (~$1,488/mo)
The next case will be at 3 a.m. anyway.
You can see how Vestamere handles it before then. We don’t ask for a credit card. We don’t put you on a call list. We don’t email you about features you didn’t ask about.