About TributeFold
An independent South African service for families making a funeral programme themselves.
What this is
TributeFold lets a family build a funeral, memorial, night vigil or tombstone unveiling programme in their browser and download it as a print-ready PDF — correctly imposed for folding, so any print shop can run it without redesigning anything. It works in English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Sepedi and Setswana, and the order of service follows the shape South African families actually use: a programme director, tributes in their respected sequence, the vote of thanks, the announcement of arrangements.
It exists because the alternative is usually one of three bad options — a funeral home's template you cannot edit, a cousin fighting with Microsoft Word at midnight, or paying a designer you have to brief while grieving.
Who runs it
TributeFold is built and run by a small independent team in South Africa. There is no call centre and no support department — messages go to one inbox and a person reads them. We are not a funeral home, we are not owned by one, and we take no commission from one. Nobody pays us to appear in the templates, the hymn library or the readings.
That independence is the reason the site will tell you plainly when something is not necessary. The free tier prints a perfectly dignified programme, and we would rather say so than pretend you need to pay.
How it makes money, and how it does not
One price, once: $11.95 to remove the small credit line from the finished PDF. There is no subscription, no account, and no second tier with better designs held back — every template, every language and every export is available before you pay anything. If you never pay, you still get a complete, print-ready programme with a single grey line in the footer.
What we do not do: sell your information, email you afterwards, add upsells to the checkout, or hold your file hostage behind a payment. There is nothing to cancel because there is nothing recurring.
Your family's details stay on your device
Everything you type — the name, the dates, the life story, the order of service — lives in your own browser and is never uploaded to us. Photographs are read locally and never leave your machine. We could not read your programme if we wanted to, and we could not recover it for you either, which is the honest trade-off and the reason we say so before you start rather than after. The privacy policy sets out exactly what that means.
What we are careful about
A funeral programme is not a design project. It is read once by people who are not looking at it properly, kept for decades, and it carries names that must be spelled correctly. So the tools are built to make the right thing easy rather than to offer infinite options: the tribute order is the one families expect, the language headings are set by people who speak the language, and the PDF is imposed so the folded booklet reads in the right order without anyone having to think about it.
Where the site gives guidance — on hymns, readings, the order of service, or how many copies to print — it is written to be genuinely useful and corrected when it is wrong. Your minister or programme director always has the final word, and we say that on the pages that matter.
Getting in touch
If something is broken, if a download failed, or if you think something on the site is factually wrong, the contact page reaches a person. Questions about a payment are covered by the refunds policy, which is short and means what it says.