Questions
Straight answers, in the order people ask.
These are the questions families actually send us in the first few days. If yours isn’t here, write to us and we’ll answer it properly.
Getting started
What happens in the first five minutes, and what you need before you begin.
Do I need to make an account?
No. There’s no sign-up, no password and nothing to verify. You open the page, answer the first question, and your project exists from that moment. Your browser holds a private link to it, and you can have that link emailed to you at any point so it is not the only copy.
How long does this take?
It is nine short steps, and only the name is required. Most of the time goes on deciding the wording rather than on the tool, so if you already have the dates, the order of service and a photograph in front of you, it goes quickly. You do not have to do it all in one sitting.
The service is tomorrow. Is there enough time?
Yes. Nothing is shipped and nothing is queued for a human to look at. You build the package, pay when you’re ready, and the PDFs download right then. Families who start in the evening are usually printing the same night.
Can I stop in the middle and come back?
Yes, and you should if you need to. Your answers save as you go. Close the tab, put the phone down, sleep. When you come back on the same device, the project is waiting where you left it. If you switched devices or cleared your browser, go to Find my project and we will email you the link.
What if I don’t know all the details yet?
Leave them blank. Almost nothing is required except the name. The preview simply leaves out what you have not filled in, so you can build the whole program around a service time you do not have yet and add it the moment the funeral home confirms.
Can someone else in the family help with it?
Yes. Use “Email me a link” at the top of the builder, then forward that email: anyone with the link can open the project and keep going. It’s safest if only one person edits at a time. If two people do save at once, the second one is stopped and offered the newer copy instead of overwriting it. One person gathering photographs while another writes the obituary works well.
The documents
What comes out at the end, and how much of it you can change.
What exactly do I get?
An order-of-service program in the fold you choose, the obituary formatted for the program plus a plain-text version you can paste into a newspaper form, a sheet of matching prayer cards, and a memorial slideshow that plays from a laptop. The program and the prayer cards come twice: once arranged for a home printer, once with bleed and crop marks for a print shop.
Can I change the order of service?
Yes. We start you with the usual order for the kind of service you are holding, whether that is a Catholic Mass, a Protestant funeral, a homegoing, a graveside committal or a celebration of life. Every line can then be renamed, reordered, removed or added to. You can name the person who is reading, singing or speaking on each line, or leave that blank.
What if we have more to include than the program will hold?
Switch the fold. A bi-fold holds the essentials, a tri-fold gives you a panel for the obituary and a panel for the acknowledgement, and the booklet keeps adding pages for a long life story or a long list of survivors. Changing the fold does not lose anything you have already written.
How many photographs can I use, and what makes a good one?
One, for the cover of the program and the front of the prayer cards. The slideshow, a separate page, takes as many as you like. A clear, well-lit photograph of the face prints much better than a group shot cropped down, and a phone photograph is usually more than enough.
Do you write the obituary for me?
Only if you ask. With writing help, your answers are turned into a first draft you can rewrite, cut or ignore entirely. It is a starting point for a blank page, not a finished text, and nothing is published anywhere. Without it, you type or paste your own words and Reposa handles the layout.
Can I use a poem or a passage I chose myself?
Yes. Paste in any reading, prayer, hymn verse or poem and it will be set in the program’s typeface. Our own guides quote only text that is in the public domain, so if you want a modern poem or song lyric, check who holds the rights before you print several hundred copies.
Printing
The part families worry about most, and the part that is already handled.
Can I print these at home?
Yes, that’s what the home-printer PDF is for. It prints on ordinary US Letter paper on any home or office printer, in color or in black and white. There is nothing to install and no design software involved. You open the PDF and press print.
Will the folds line up?
Yes. The pages are already arranged in the right order for the fold you chose, so the back cover lands on the back and the order of service lands where you expect after one crease. This is the step that goes wrong when families build a program in a word processor, and it is the main thing Reposa is doing for you.
What paper should I use?
Something a little heavier than plain copy paper. A text-weight sheet holds a fold cleanly without cracking and does not show the ink from the other side. Prayer cards want proper card stock so they survive a purse or a wallet. Any office-supply store carries both, and a matte finish is easier to read in a church than a glossy one.
Can a print shop or the funeral home print them?
Yes. Use the print-shop PDF, which has bleed and crop marks and is the file a commercial printer expects. Email it, put it on a flash drive, or upload it to a copy shop’s online order form. You can hand the same file to the funeral home if they have offered to print for you.
Payment
One price, paid once, at the end. Nothing is charged while you build.
What does it cost?
Essential is $39 and Complete is $59. That covers the program, the obituary, the prayer cards, the slideshow, home and print-shop versions of the program and prayer cards, and re-downloads for twelve months. Optional add-ons can be attached to Essential: Writing help ($15), Celebration-of-life kit ($12), Keepsake set ($12), Large-print order of service ($8). Every one of them is already included in Complete.
When do I pay?
At the very end, when you want the files. Building the package, choosing a design, changing your mind about the design four times and reading every page of the preview are all free. If you decide Reposa is not right for you, you close the tab and you have paid nothing.
Is there a subscription, or anything that renews?
No. It is a single payment. There is no account to cancel, no card kept on file for a future charge, and no plan that quietly renews next year. If you never come back, nothing happens.
How do I pay, and do you see my card?
Payment runs through Stripe, which handles the card details on its own checkout page. We never see or store your card number. You give an email address so the receipt and the link back to your project have somewhere to go.
Can I get a refund?
Yes, within seven days, and you don’t have to explain why. Email us and we refund the payment. We don’t ask what went wrong, and we don’t make you sit through an offer to stay.
Privacy
You are handing us a person’s name, their dates and their photograph. Here is what we do with them.
Who can see the program while I am building it?
Only someone holding the link. Projects are not listed anywhere, not shown to other visitors and not indexed by search engines. The person’s name will not turn up in a search because you used Reposa.
What happens to the photographs I upload?
They go into private storage that is not open to the web. When a photograph needs to appear in your preview or your PDF, it is fetched through a link that expires shortly after it is created. We do not put your photographs on the site, in advertising, or anywhere else.
Do you sell my information?
No. We do not sell or rent anything you enter, we do not run advertising trackers, and we do not build a profile on you. There is one cookie, and its only job is to remember which projects this browser is allowed to open.
How long do you keep my project?
Drafts that were never purchased are deleted about thirty days after you last worked on them. Purchased projects are kept for twelve months, plus a thirty-day grace period, so you can come back and fix a detail or print more copies, then removed. You can delete a project yourself at any time from the last step of the builder, or ask us and we will.
If something goes wrong
There’s a person at the other end of that email address, and there aren’t many of us.
I lost the link to my project.
Go to Find my project and enter the email address you used at checkout, or the one you had your link sent to. We will send the links to every project connected to that address. If you never gave us an address and your browser has forgotten the project, the work may be gone. That is why the builder offers, from the first step, to email you the link.
Can I talk to a person?
Email help@getreposa.com. We usually reply within a few hours during the day, and we read everything. We don’t have a phone line, because a small company with a phone line mostly gives you a hold queue.
I found a mistake after I printed them.
Open the project, fix the wording, and download again at no extra cost for twelve months. A misspelled middle name, a corrected time, an added pallbearer: none of them cost anything to fix. Reprinting is between you and your printer.