Terms of use

What Plainfare is, and what it is not

Plainfare is a directory of prices and providers, plus a checklist for settling someone’s affairs after a death.

We are not a funeral home, crematory, cemetery, insurer, law firm, or broker. We do not sell funeral goods or services, we do not arrange them, and we are not paid a commission when you buy anything from a funeral home, crematory, or cemetery.

This is information, not professional advice

Nothing on Plainfare is legal, tax, financial, or medical advice, and using the site does not create a professional relationship of any kind. Deadlines, filing requirements, and what counts as a small estate vary by state and by situation, sometimes by county.

Use our guides and checklist to understand what is coming and to walk in prepared. Confirm what applies to you with the provider, the court, or a professional before you act on it.

What our prices mean

Every price we publish carries the source it came from. Prices change, and a price we collected months ago may not be the price today. Treat what you see here as the basis for a question, not as a quote.

For funeral homes, the authoritative document is the provider’s own General Price List. Under the FTC Funeral Rule you have a right to that list in person, and a right to accurate price information by phone. The FTC’s guide for funeral providers says they cannot require your name, address, or phone number before they answer. Ours is a comparison tool; theirs is the binding document.

Every price we publish came from the provider: submitted by the business itself, taken from its published price list, given to us by phone, or extracted from the provider’s own website. Where a price was collected automatically rather than by a person, we publish it only after someone here has approved it. The source label on each price says which.

Where we have no price we can publish, we show nothing rather than an estimate. If you find a price here that is wrong, tell us at contact@plainfare.com and we will correct it.

What a listing means

Being listed on Plainfare is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or a certification. We do not vet providers, we do not verify licensing, and we do not rank by quality.

Where a provider has paid for placement, it appears first in our directory listings and is labeled Sponsored. That label means the position was paid for. It says nothing about the quality of the provider, and it never changes a price we publish.

Star ratings and review counts come from Google and belong to Google. We display them; we do not calculate or moderate them.

When you send a request to a provider

We pass your request to the provider you chose, or to our own inbox to forward if they have not claimed their listing. That is all we do.

We are not a party to anything you go on to agree with a provider, we do not guarantee that anyone will respond, and we are not responsible for what a provider charges you, how they treat you, or what they deliver. Those are between you and them.

Your account and what you put in it

You are responsible for what you enter, including anything you write about the person who died or about other family members. Only enter information about another person if you have the standing to share it.

Keep access to the email address on your account, because that is how signing in works.

Using the site fairly

• Do not scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract our listings or price data, or republish it as a dataset.
• Do not use provider contact details from the directory to send marketing.
• Do not submit requests you do not mean, automate the request form, or work around rate limits.
• Do not attempt to reach accounts, data, or systems that are not yours.

For providers: claims and paid listings

Claiming a listing means representing that you are authorized to act for that business. We verify by email domain where we can and by hand where we cannot, and we can decline or revoke a claim.

A paid listing is a flat fee for a period of time. It buys position and presentation. It does not buy a change to any price we publish, removal of a competitor, or any payment tied to whether a family buys something from you. We do not take referral commissions.

Paid links

Some pages may link to companies outside the directory that sell things families need, and we may earn a commission if you buy through one of those links. Where that is the case it is labeled as a paid link, in its own box, before you click. It never changes what our guides say or what our price data shows.

Our content and other people’s marks

Our guides, checklist content, and the way we assemble and label price data are ours. You are welcome to link to any of it and to quote a reasonable amount with attribution. Republishing it wholesale or as a dataset is not permitted.

Provider names, logos, and trademarks belong to those businesses and appear here to identify them.

What we do not promise

We work hard to keep the site accurate, but we provide it as it is. We do not promise that it will always be available, that every price or detail is current, or that it fits your particular situation. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for losses arising from your use of the site or from your dealings with any provider you found through it.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.

Changes, and how to reach us

If we change these terms we post the new version here with a new effective date. Questions, corrections, and complaints all go to contact@plainfare.com, and we read every one.