About Itemized

Itemized checks a funeral home's General Price List against the Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule (16 CFR Part 453). It was built by Butch Ewing during the Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon (October 26 to November 4, 2026), and it is free to use. It is hosted on mortuary.ai, the domain of Mortuary.AI, a company Butch Ewing also runs.

Why it exists

The Funeral Rule gives families the right to an itemized price list so they can choose and pay for only what they want. The FTC checks compliance with undercover calls and visits, and in its 2020 inspection results, 17 of 90 funeral homes visited did not give itemized prices when they should have. Many funeral homes are small businesses without a compliance department. Itemized gives them, and the families they serve, a quick reading of a list against the Rule's requirements.

How it decides

A Meta Muse Spark model transcribes the list into structured data: each item, each price, and each block of notice text, with the page it came from. Fixed rules written from the Rule's text then check that data. Only those fixed rules can mark a requirement as not passed. Questions that need judgment about wording or placement go to the model, and those results can only be marked for a person to review. Every result cites the section of the Rule it comes from and quotes the part of the list it is based on.

The rules, the checks and the evaluation are open source under the Apache-2.0 license at github.com/butchewing/itemized. The evaluation, in EVAL.md, measures every check against labeled price lists, including fictional lists written for the purpose and the FTC's own sample list.

What it does not do

Itemized is an automated, AI-assisted check of a General Price List against the federal FTC Funeral Rule (16 CFR Part 453). It does not check state law, such as Texas Funeral Service Commission rules. It does not check the Casket Price List, the Outer Burial Container Price List or the Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected.

The AI can misread documents, especially photos. These results are not legal advice and are not a finding that anyone broke the law.

Funeral homes: confirm any result with your attorney or your state funeral regulator before acting on it.

Families: if something here concerns you, ask the funeral home about it. You can also contact the Federal Trade Commission or the state agency that licenses funeral homes.

Contact

Questions, corrections and deletion requests: itemized@mortuary.ai.