Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 2026

This policy describes how Honest Funeral Co. collects, uses, and protects your information. We wrote it in plain language on purpose, because the people who read it are often in the middle of a loss. We treat anything you share with us, including anything you tell us about a person who has died, as sensitive, even where health-privacy laws do not technically apply.

This describes our current practices. It is not a substitute for legal advice, and we update it as the product changes.

1. We never sell your data

Honest Funeral does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, or any information about the person who died, to anyone. We run no advertising and use no ad-tracking networks. This is a commitment, not just a legal statement.

2. What we collect

• Account: your email address and a password (which we store only in hashed form), or, if you choose to sign in with Google, the email address and name Google shares with us.
• Quote checks: when you paste or photograph a price list, we read the line items from it. If you are signed in, we save the resulting analysis to your account (the extracted text with contact details stripped out, the totals, the line items, and the ZIP code). If you are not signed in, we save nothing about you or your document.
• Photos: a photo you take of a price list is shrunk on your own device, sent to our AI provider to read the text, and then discarded. We never store the photo.
• The funeral-home outreach: if you use the feature that contacts funeral homes for you, we collect what you enter to run it, such as the ZIP code, the type of service, your name, the date of death, and any notes you add, plus any replies the homes send back.
• Reminders you opt into: if you ask for text-message reminders, we store the phone number you give us and your opt-in.
• Guides and drafts:if you use the obituary helper while signed in, we save your inputs and the draft to your account. Some tools, like the eulogy helper and the “decide what kind of service fits” walkthrough, keep your answers only on your own device unless you choose to save or share them.
• Email sign-ups: if you ask us to email you a guide or planning cheat-sheet, we store your email address, the page you asked from, and a one-way hashed form of your IP address to prevent abuse.
• Basic usage analytics: pages viewed and features used, in aggregate. We use a privacy-respecting analytics service that does not use tracking cookies; it records coarse, city-level geography rather than storing your full IP address.

3. How we use it

• To provide the features you use.
• To communicate with you about your account and any active case.
• To improve our regional price benchmarks, always in aggregated form, and only using prices you have chosen to contribute (see the next section).
• To meet legal and accounting obligations.

4. Contributing to the public price data (optional)

When you check a quote, you will see an optional checkbox that lets you add your de-identified prices to our public fair-price data. It is unchecked by default, and we never assume your consent. If you leave it unchecked, your prices are not added to that public dataset. To be clear about what the checkbox does and does not do: it controls only whether your prices join the public benchmarks. If you are signed in, the check itself is still saved to your own account history either way, so you can come back to it.

5. When you arrive through a hospice or employer

Our tools are free to you, with or without a partner link. Our revenue model is institutional: any revenue we earn comes from hospices and employers that make these tools available to the families and people they serve — never from you and never from funeral homes. If one of them gave you a link or a code, here is exactly how that works.

• The code is just a label.When you arrive through a partner’s link, we record that your visit came through their program, using a simple referral code. It carries no medical or clinical information. The hospice or employer does not send us anything about you. You bring the code; they transmit nothing.
• It never changes what we show you. The referral code is a reporting label only. It never affects which funeral homes we show you or the order they appear in. We answer to you, and we present neutral options for you to choose from.
• Partners only ever see anonymous totals. What a hospice or employer can see about their program is limited to aggregate, de-identified statistics: counts and ranges. They never see your name, your contact details, your location, your prices, the funeral home you chose, or anything you wrote. Dollar and satisfaction figures are withheld entirely until at least five families in their program have completed cases.
• In plain terms:a partner can see how many people used their link, but a small count shows only as “fewer than five,” never as an exact number. A partner who shared a link with just one family could still tell that the link was used at all, so we ask partners not to make per-family links — and either way, they never see who you are, what you paid, or what you chose.

6. Sharing a plan with your family

Some tools let you create a private link to hand your progress to a family member (for example, “save this for my daughter”). When you do, we store the snapshot you chose to share so the link can open it. Anyone who has the link can view what you shared, so only send it to people you trust. These links are anonymous and are not tied to your account, and the “save for my daughter” snapshot expires on its own after seven days.

7. The funeral-home outreach: what funeral homes see

If you authorize the funeral-home outreach feature, the emails we send to funeral homes identify Honest Funeral as the sender and name the family we represent (for example, “the Smith family” or a first name plus city). Funeral homes see that identifying label about your family.

Your email address and direct contact information are not shared with funeral homes through our service. Any pre-meeting questions and scheduling between you and a home you select are relayed through our in-app messaging, so only the contents you send, and the home’s replies, are exchanged. When you attend the in-person arrangement meeting, the funeral home collects your contact information directly from you for their own records. Honest Funeral is not a funeral home or funeral director, does not arrange funerals or handle remains, and does not sign anything for you. You contract directly with the funeral home you choose.

8. How we use AI

Some features use AI to read a price list, draft an obituary, or help parse a reply. To do that, the text or photo involved is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to process. We do not store the prompts, the photos, or the AI’s responses. We keep only the model name and usage counts, so we can manage costs. AI drafts are drafts: please review anything it produces before you rely on it.

9. Cookies and similar technology

We keep cookies to a minimum and do not use advertising or cross-site-tracking cookies. We use a sign-in cookie to keep you logged in. Our analytics does not set tracking cookies. If you read certain sensitive guidance pages, we set a short-lived cookie (about four hours) so we can avoid interrupting you with commercial prompts right afterward. We use your IP address only briefly, to prevent abuse of our forms, and we do not store it, except for the one-way hashed form saved with an email sign-up.

10. Data retention and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from your account settings. Doing so immediately and permanently removes the data tied to your account, including your profile, saved quote checks, negotiations and messages, certificate trackers, and obituary drafts. A few things sit outside your account and are not removed by an account deletion: aggregated, de-identified price benchmarks (which no longer identify you), and any anonymous family-sharing links you created (which expire on their own). We may keep certain records longer where the law requires it. Copies held by the services that send our email and text messages, and routine encrypted backups, age out over time.

11. Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or ask for a portable export. California and European residents have additional rights under the CCPA and GDPR, which we honor. Email privacy@honestfuneral.co to exercise any right.

12. Security

We use standard safeguards: encryption in transit (TLS), encrypted storage, and access controls that limit our team to what they need. Information saved to your account is protected by database rules that tie it to your account so other users cannot read it. No system is perfect. If we learn of a breach affecting your information, we will notify you as required by law.

13. Services we rely on

We use a small set of providers to run the service: Supabase (database, sign-in, and storage), Vercel (web hosting and the privacy-respecting analytics above), Anthropic (the AI that reads text and drafts content), Resend (sending our email), Postmark (receiving funeral-home replies), and Twilio (sending the text reminders you opt into). We also use Stripe for institutional billing only — the hospices and employers we partner with, never families — and because families never pay us, Stripe does not process any family payment information. These providers handle limited data on our behalf under standard data-processing terms. We do not send your data to advertising networks.

14. Children

Honest Funeral is not directed to children under 16. If we learn we have collected information from a child, we will delete it.

15. Changes

We may update this policy. Material changes will be posted here with a new date and, where significant, announced by email.

16. Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@honestfuneral.co. For misuse of the Service or security reports, safety@honestfuneral.co.

See also our Terms of Service and Accessibility Statement.