Frequently Asked Questions

Rainbow Bridges is a living memorial garden for your pet - a private, beautiful corner of the internet that changes with the seasons and time of day, where you can place their tombstone, decorate around it, build a photo album of your memories together, and receive a gentle reminder on their birthday and other meaningful dates. It's a place to visit whenever you want to feel close to them again.

To create an account, click the "Sign Up" button in the header. If you begin creating a memorial while logged out, you will be asked to log in, and you can choose "Create one free" if you are new. After your account is created, you will be able to make your first memorial garden.

If you enter your password incorrectly three times, a “Forgot password?” link will appear beneath the Sign In button. Select it and follow the prompts to reset your password.

Rainbow Bridges works on any modern browser, on both desktop and mobile.

Not quite yet — but it's coming. Your garden will always reflect the real-world season and time of day, but Premium members will soon be able to choose between different backdrops. Each backdrop has the same 8 season and day/night variants, so your garden still changes with the real world — just in a different setting.

Seasons follow the standard calendar: Spring is March through May, Summer is June through August, Autumn is September through November, and Winter is December through February.

Your garden shifts to its daytime scene at 6:00 AM and to its nighttime scene at 6:00 PM, based on your own local time when you visit.

Yes — garden owners can choose between No Music or the Cloud Haven ambient soundscape from their garden settings (Manage Garden). Additional premium music tracks are coming soon. Visitors can also mute or unmute the music at any time using the audio controls built into their browser.

Free accounts include up to 2 memorial gardens - enough for most families to create a space for each pet they're remembering. Premium offers unlimited gardens for those who need more.

Yes - up to 3 pets per garden. Any more than that would start to feel crowded, and we want each pet's tombstone and photo to have room to stand out, not compete for space.

Yes. On the Manage Garden page, use the Move button on your pet’s card to move them from one garden to another. You can also adjust the order of pets using the up and down arrows on each card.

If you don't see your pet's species listed, choose Other and you'll be able to type in the species yourself.

The pet name limit is 28 characters and the epitaph limit is 50 characters. Just like a real tombstone, only so much fits gracefully in the space, so shorter names — including nicknames — and a short, meaningful line often feel the most powerful.

Yes. Each garden can have up to 30 regular decorations. This helps keep gardens beautiful, easy to arrange, and running smoothly for everyone.

Those control layering - bring to front, bring forward, send backward, and send to back - so you can arrange decorations exactly how you want them to overlap.

No - decorations are designed to stay upright, just as you'd see them placed in a real garden.

Decoration placement is anchored to each tombstone, not to the backdrop. As your screen size changes, the backdrop adjusts to fit — and decorations shift along with it to stay correctly positioned relative to the tombstones, rather than relative to the backdrop. This is intentional: it keeps a decoration looking right where you placed it next to its tombstone, no matter what device or window size someone is viewing your garden from.

In portrait mode on mobile, the garden is view‑only because there isn’t enough space to display the decoration‑editing tools. To add, move, resize, or remove decorations, switch to landscape mode, where full editing is available.

That's an anniversary decoration - it appears automatically on your pet's birthday, adoption anniversary, or passing anniversary, and a special combined decoration appears if more than one falls on the same day. It disappears again at the end of that day. It's a small, automatic way of marking the date without you having to do anything.

A few things to check: make sure you entered a full date with month, day, and year. A year alone isn't enough for us to know which day to celebrate. Also check your notification settings to make sure that reminder type is turned on, and confirm the date matches today's date in your local time zone, since that's when the decoration appears and the email sends.

You can add up to 10 photos per pet. We chose a limit to keep each album feeling curated - a meaningful collection of favorites, rather than an unsorted dump of every photo you have.

In Settings > Notifications, you can toggle each of the three reminder types independently. Birthday and adoption reminders are on by default; passing anniversary reminders are off by default, since that's a more personal choice only you should opt into.

The most common causes are an incomplete date, a notification toggle that's off, or a time zone mismatch. Make sure the date includes month, day, and year; check Settings > Notifications; and confirm that the anniversary date matches today's date in your local time zone.

Yes - anyone visiting your garden can leave a tribute message, and can place a flower as a small gesture of remembrance. As the garden owner, you can remove any tribute messages or flowers if needed.

Flowers are a small, temporary gesture of remembrance. They remain in a garden for 7 days, then gently fade away, much like flowers at a real memorial. This keeps the garden feeling peacefully cared for over time.

A public garden can be viewed by anyone and may appear in our Memorial Gardens directory. A private garden is hidden from public browsing — only people with the direct link can visit.

You can change this anytime from the Manage Garden page. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the public/private visibility setting.

At the top right corner of your pet's memorial garden, you'll find a share button. Click it to get a direct link you can send to family and friends, so they can visit and pay their respects too.

Even when your garden is private, it still has its own direct link. You can find it using the Share button at the top‑right corner of your garden. Anyone you share that link with can visit, while your garden remains hidden from public browsing and the Memorial Gardens directory.

If your garden is public, people can find it by browsing the Memorial Gardens directory or through search. If it's private, the only way in is the direct link you choose to share.

Visitors — on both private and public gardens — can see the garden itself: each tombstone with its photo, dates, and epitaph, along with any decorations you've added. They can leave a flower from a small pop-up window, and submit a message from the Tributes page. On the Meet Our Pets pop-up, they'll see whichever details you've chosen to make visible — species and breed, date of birth, date adopted, date of passing, bio, and a link to view photos. Visitors cannot edit decorations, pin or delete tribute messages, see which messages are yours, or access your Manage Garden page.

Manage Garden is where you edit an existing memorial: pet details and dates, tombstone shape and color, pet ordering, moving pets between gardens, garden visibility, visitor display options for the Meet Our Pets section, replaying onboarding, and garden deletion. Photos are managed separately from the Photo Album page, which is located within the Meet Our Pets section of your garden.

Empty signups that do not confirm their email may be removed after 48 hours. Confirmed but unused accounts and accounts that have created a memorial garden follow separate, longer inactivity-review periods. Recent visitor activity is considered before any memorial cleanup decision. See the Data Retention section of our Privacy Policy for the current periods, planned notices, safeguards, and exceptions.

From Settings, you can request account deletion. This is permanent: it removes your account, gardens, tributes, photos, and decorations. We verify the request and apply a 72-hour security hold before processing. We aim to complete eligible requests within one calendar month after deletion processing begins, although limited records may be retained when required or permitted for billing, security, legal, compliance, processor, or protected-backup purposes. See our Terms of Service for details.

There's no separate collaborator access right now - but if you share your account login with someone you trust, such as a spouse or family member, they can sign in and help manage your gardens the same way you do.

The free plan includes up to 2 memorial gardens with up to 3 pets each, 3 tombstone shapes, 5 tombstone colors, 18 decorations, a 10-photo album per pet, tributes and messages from visitors, public or private visibility, and anniversary email reminders for birthdays, adoption days, and passing anniversaries.

Yes. The free plan isn't a trial - it's a genuine, permanent way to use Rainbow Bridges for as long as you want, at no cost.

No - creating an account and your first two memorial gardens are completely free, with no card required.

Yes - whenever Premium becomes available to you, upgrading will never affect what you've already built. Everything you've created stays exactly as it is; Premium simply adds more on top of it.

Not yet - we're working on it! Premium will include more memorial gardens, additional garden backdrops, additional tombstone shapes and colors, premium decorations, premium music tracks, and a beautiful PDF export. Curious? Let us know from your account Settings under Plan & Billing, and we'll notify you the moment it's ready.

We don't have a firm date yet - we'd rather take the time to build it thoughtfully than rush it. If you'd like to be notified the moment it's available, sign up from Settings > Plan & Billing.