Nathan Morris: Why a Licensed Kentucky Funeral Director and Embalmer Built GPLscore

I'm Nathan Morris, a licensed Kentucky funeral director and embalmer, and for more than 15 years one piece of paper has sat between me and almost every family I've served. It isn't the death certificate. It isn't the obituary. It's the General Price List.

If you've never planned a funeral, you may not know what that is. If you have, you remember it. It's the sheet with every service and every price on it, and it lands on the table at the worst moment of someone's life. A family walks into the arrangement room carrying a person. Then they get handed a list of numbers.

I've watched people read that list. I've watched them go quiet. I've watched families turn it over looking for the part that tells them what their person actually needs. And I've learned that the way a price list reads tells a family, in about ten seconds, whether they can trust the people in the room.

That is why I built GPLscore.

What a General Price List is supposed to do

The FTC Funeral Rule has been around since the 1980s. The heart of it is simple: families have the right to know what things cost before they buy, and the right to choose only the goods and services they want. The General Price List is how a funeral home keeps that promise. Certain items have to be on it. Certain disclosures have to be worded a certain way. It has to be handed to anyone who asks about arrangements in person.

That's the rule. Here's what I saw in real life.

Most funeral directors I know are good people who got into this work to take care of families. Very few of them got into it to become compliance writers. The price list gets built once, copied forward, edited by three different managers over ten years, and nobody reads it start to finish again until something goes wrong. A disclosure gets dropped. A package gets added that isn't explained. Wording drifts. None of it is on purpose. All of it makes a hard day harder for the family holding the paper.

The day the price list moved online

For most of my career, the GPL lived in a folder. A family saw it when they sat down with me. That's not how it works anymore.

Families shop before they call. They search a funeral home's name, they look at the website, they read reviews, and more and more they look for prices. That means the price list isn't a document you hand across the desk at the end of a first meeting. A lot of the time it's the first thing a family reads from you, alone, at night, on their phone, before they ever hear your voice.

When I realized that, I stopped thinking about the GPL as paperwork. It's a first impression. It's the funeral home talking before the funeral director gets the chance to.

Why I built a tool instead of writing a checklist

I could have written a blog post that said "here are the rules, go check your list." I've seen plenty of those. The problem is that nobody has time to sit with the Funeral Rule and a red pen after a day of removals, arrangements and services.

So I built GPLscore. You give it your price list and it grades it against what the Funeral Rule asks for, then shows you where it falls short in plain language. It's free to get your grade. My goal was to make the check take minutes instead of a weekend, so the people who actually serve families can spend their time with families.

I built it the same way I build everything now. I'm a funeral director who learned to use technology instead of fearing it. I run Selection Room, a daily content idea tool for funeral professionals, and I spend a lot of my time helping funeral homes show up online with honesty and warmth. GPLscore came out of the same belief: the funeral profession doesn't need less humanity, it needs fewer things standing in the way of it.

What a good price list feels like to a family

Here's what I'd tell any funeral home owner who asked me what "good" looks like.

A good price list is clear before it's clever. A family should be able to find the one thing they're looking for without decoding anything.

A good price list is honest about choices. The Funeral Rule exists so families can pick what they want and skip what they don't. When your list makes that easy, it says "we're on your side."

A good price list matches what you say in the room. If the paper and the person tell two different stories, the family believes neither.

And a good price list is current. If you changed a price last spring and the PDF on your website didn't change with it, you just told every family who found it that you don't pay attention.

None of that requires lowering a single price. It's not about being cheaper. It's about being readable, and being readable is a form of respect.

Why this matters to me

People sometimes ask how a funeral director ends up building software and writing songs at the same time. To me it's all one job. A song takes something heavy and makes it something you can carry. A clear price list does the same thing for a family on the worst day they've had. Both are about taking care of the person on the other side.

I've spent more than 15 years in this profession, and I hold my Kentucky funeral director and embalmer license because I still believe in it. GPLscore is one small way I try to make it better for the families who walk through the door, and for the directors who serve them.

If you run or work at a funeral home, here's the one thing I'd ask: run your price list through GPLscore.com this week. It's free, it takes a few minutes, and you'll know exactly where you stand.