R.I.P. off

The cost of living includes the cost of dying. It'll be interesting to see does traffic reduce.

"Will remain free for the ordinary punter" - yeah…

Undertakers must be getting a chunk of that new fee, otherwise they could just set up a rival site and rip.ie would be dead in the water.

Undertaker gave me the login for RIP and I wrote my mother's death notice.
Undertaker charged for it.
I wanted to challenge the item but like I am sure happens in a lot of cases, the rest of the family thought that would be distasteful.

Would take years and years to get the existing cohort of ghouls, sorry, daily users and also undertakers to move site.

Also, I expect you'll find ten different sites pop up each of which gets about a twentieth of the total deaths posted. And never develop any income stream at all.

There's a reason the "new free classified ads" sites we see spammed on here constantly rarely last beyond the first domain renewal date.

Donedeal could start somthing soon.

My undertaker definitely charged for putting my mother's notice on RIP when she died a few years ago.

Tbh I always assumed they charged for listings

RIP when free is so comprehensive (close to 100% coverage) that it can apparently be used to estimate death rates more quickly than the official Registrar General figures, because of delays in registering deaths. This valuable feature will vanish once they charge.

Not that that will stop the Irish Times lecturing us on the public good. 😎

Mournhub

My mother died 2 years ago and I distinctly remember a 50 euro charge for death notice on RIP.ie. So if the charge was 50 back when it was free, presumably its going to go up to 150 (or possibly more). Like you, it was felt that haggling over the invoice was distasteful.

Lots of people have funeral insurance now, so the under takers get away with charging pretty much what they want.

What muck? I see it sells out occasionally in my local sop

Thinking the exact same.

There are a few things here:

1. There are (not insignificant, but unknown publicilly) costs involved in hosting, developing and manageing the site. Over the some of the costs may have gone down but the complexity of the site and other aspects involved may have gone up. I am surprised they were essentially able to keep the site free to post on for as long as they did.
2. Add revenue has been dropping for a while. That model isn't enough to sustain a service such as this.

Seperately it appears:

1. Some undertakers have been charging an RIP related fee to the bill payers which they are within their rights to charge as there is some work involved but they didn't actually need to pay RIP for the notice. I think its strange that people pay the undertaker for X,Y and Z but expect some of the other service providers in the chain to do things for free. (I appreciate not all undertakers did this)
2. It's difficult to query anything involved in funeral services - there's definetly some consumer abuse going on because of this - that's a seperate question.

€100 sounds expensive - roughly 35,500 people died in Ireland in 2023. Lets say 25K notices ended up on RIP - thats approximately 2.5 million per annum + whatever other ancillarry income comes in from the site. Thats not an insignificant business and I'd wager that 25K notices is conservative.

slán.ie

heavensent.ie passedon.ie raisedup.ie