Fast printed program layouts for funeral homes

The idea

Somewhere right now a funeral director is fighting Microsoft Word at 9pm because the service is at 10am, the family sent photos an hour ago, and the obituary is 300 words longer than the template fits. Programs are produced under the tightest deadline in print media, by people with no design training, for an audience that will keep the document forever. Canva technically works and practically does not, because it assumes design time the director does not have.

The wedge is the family intake link. The bottleneck was never layout, it was collecting photos and text from a grieving family via email and getting them into the document. Structured intake plus auto-flowing text turns a two-hour Word fight into a ten-minute review.

Who pays

The funeral home pays $29/month, and the economics are comfortable: homes already charge families $75 to $150 for printed programs, so the tool is margin recovery on an existing line item across 5 to 20 services a month. Buyers are independent funeral homes, reached through funeral-director associations, trade publications, and the print shops that serve them and would happily receive cleaner files.

MVP scope

• Five bi-fold templates with restrained, print-appropriate design
• Family intake link for photos, obituary, and structured service details
• Auto-flowing obituary text with type-scaling and overflow warnings
• Print-ready PDF export with bleed and crop marks, plus office-printer version
• Skip for v1: trifolds and prayer cards, online memorial pages, template customisation beyond colour accents, and multi-location firms

Build ProgramPress, a memorial program builder for funeral homes. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth, storage), Stripe for subscriptions. PDF generation server-side with Puppeteer rendering print-CSS pages.

Core flow: a funeral director creates a service (deceased name, dates, service date/location) and picks one of five restrained, tasteful templates (traditional, floral, modern, religious, photo-forward), each a bi-fold layout on letter or A4. The director sends the family an intake link, no login: the family uploads a cover photo and up to 12 gallery photos, pastes the obituary text, and fills structured fields for order of service, pallbearers, and acknowledgements. The director reviews, adjusts, and exports.

The text engine is the point: obituaries vary from 80 to 800 words, so the layout auto-flows text across the inside spread, scaling within a defined type-size range and overflowing gracefully to a second sheet when needed, with a live warning when text is too long for one sheet. Photos auto-fit into template slots with simple crop adjustment.

Export produces a print-ready PDF with 3mm bleed and crop marks for the local print shop, plus a bleed-free version for office printers.

Pages: services list, service editor with live preview, family intake page, template picker, settings, billing.

Non-obvious detail: intake links expire after the service date and photos purge after 90 days, stated plainly, since grief-adjacent data retention is sensitive.

Pricing: $29/month per funeral home, unlimited services.