After the Kitchen Table: A Three-Year Cost Comparison of DIY Estate Tools vs. The Billable Hour

An estate attorney bills by the hour for every question you ask. An online will maker charges once and lets you print the same page as many times as it takes to get the margins right. That contrast is the whole cost argument, and it's the one I've been testing since my father died at the kitchen table and left three people's estate planning in my lap: his, my mother's, and eventually my own. I'm a reference librarian, not a lawyer, but three years of DIY legal forms and bereavement paperwork for one Indiana household taught me exactly where those savings hold up and where they quietly stop.

Quick disclosure before the numbers start: several of the will-software, legal-form, and tax-prep links below pay me a referral fee if you subscribe through them, at no extra cost to you. My household ran all three tools through actual paperwork between 2023 and 2026, and that income helps keep this comparison current. None of it replaces a licensed attorney's advice for your own situation.

Comparing an Online Will Maker to a Law Office, Line by Line

Local firms in the suburbs of Indianapolis quoted rates that made my librarian paycheck flinch. For a plan covering my mother and a fresh will for myself, the upfront estimates landed comfortably in the thousands before either of us had signed anything. My father's estate sat close to Indiana's Small Estate Affidavit threshold, and handing a chunk of that to a partner in a paneled office felt like the wrong math.

Before I paid for anything, I tried the free route. I found a will template through a search result and printed it out, only to realize afterward it was written for California law: useless for an Indiana household, and worse than starting from nothing since I'd already told myself the job was done. That's when I stopped looking for free and started looking for software built around state-specific language, which is how I landed on WillMaker for the heavy lifting.

Working inside WillMaker felt like using a well-indexed database instead of a legal maze. The document suite runs 35-plus forms, not just a will. It includes a healthcare directive (called a living will or advance directive in some software), a financial power of attorney, final arrangements, and a letter to survivors I didn't know I'd need until I was drafting one for my mother. Durable power of attorney carries its own rules for aging parents specifically, and I've covered that ground in a separate piece rather than repeat it here. The self-proving clause is the page that saves your heirs a future court appearance, and since another post on this site walks through exactly what that clause does, I'll just say it's worth confirming your software includes it before you print anything. The beneficiary worksheet inside WillMaker is what caught a missing contingent for my brother before the will was even finished, a mistake that costs nothing to fix in software and real money to fix in an attorney's office.

WillMaker covers 49 states, though it says upfront it won't help in Louisiana because of that state's civil law system. For everyone else, it's a solid kitchen-table tool, and you can look at the WillMaker document list here to see whether the suite covers what your household actually needs before you buy anything.

Where the Math Stops Favoring DIY

The tradeoff for what I saved upfront is what I'd call the corrective cost. If my mother's situation gets more complicated, say she sells the house and needs a specialized trust for assisted living, I may end up paying an attorney to review or undo what I drafted myself. For a simple estate that risk is one I accept, but I tell my brother the same thing every time: once assets cross the $500,000 mark, or a blended family enters the picture, hand the draft to a professional before anyone files anything.

A revocable living trust changes that math further, since it's a different structure than a will entirely and worth its own careful comparison rather than a paragraph here. The same goes for a handful of documents that don't fit neatly into "will" but still belong in the same folder: a personal property memorandum for who gets which heirloom, a letter of instruction for whoever ends up executing the estate, a digital asset inventory for accounts that don't stop existing just because someone died, a codicil for when life changes after the will is already signed, a HIPAA authorization so a family member can actually get information from a hospital, and a transfer-on-death deed or quitclaim deed if real property needs to move without going through probate at all. Software handles most of these as add-ons to the main package. An attorney bills each one separately, which is where a "simple" plan quietly stops being simple.

The Subscription You Have to Remember to Cancel

Estate planning isn't only about death. It's also the life still happening in the house afterward: a tenant moving into the basement, a contractor pulling cabinets off the wall, a lease that needs a clause added halfway through the year. None of that fits inside will software, which is where LawDepot earns its keep, with a library running past 400 legal forms behind one subscription.

The interview format asks about your situation rather than the legal name of the document, which matters when you don't know whether you need a lease or a rental agreement or something else entirely. The first rental agreement I built for the family friend renting our basement printed clean on the first try, no do-overs, and she signed it that same afternoon at the table. Compare that to the free will template that cost me an afternoon and taught me nothing except that state-specific software exists for a reason. When that tenant moved out early, I went back in and wrote a sublease agreement instead of starting from scratch.

That subscription renews on its own every month, so it rewards people who set a calendar reminder and punishes people who forget why they signed up in the first place. One thing most people don't check first: a surprising number of US public libraries carry a version of this same form library through their own subscription databases, filed under a different name, and a library card gets you free access in renewable windows. I mention this to every patron who asks me for legal forms at my own reference desk before they pay for anything direct.

LawDepot's own will templates exist, but they're noticeably thinner than what WillMaker produces. I ran a comparison draft through LawDepot once out of curiosity and went back to WillMaker for the version that actually mattered, which told me everything about which tool earns its keep for which job: LawDepot for the paperwork the house generates, WillMaker for the paperwork a death generates.

Tax Season Becomes Part of the Estate Too

My father's CPA retired the season after he passed, and I inherited a pile of 1099s and a 1040 I didn't fully understand. Prior tax software I'd used before buried the free option under upsells that felt like being cornered at a reference desk by someone who won't take "the answer is in that book" for an answer.

I switched to E-file after reading about its prior-year import feature. With a PDF of dad's last return in hand, it pulled in roughly 80 percent of the line items without retyping everything from scratch, which matters when you're doing this alone for the first time. For a single-person household, the federal return is free once your adjusted gross income falls under the threshold the software sets for simple returns, which was a relief while the estate's bank account was still tied up. Filing a final return for someone who has died is its own separate skill with its own separate paperwork, and I've kept that explanation in its own place rather than fold it in here. You can read my full notes on why I switched to E-file.com if a similar transition is landing on you.

The interface looks a decade behind some of the bigger names, and the back button hides itself more than I'd like, but Schedule D wanted a cost basis the import couldn't carry over, so I looked it up by hand once and moved on. I'm not a CPA and won't pretend otherwise. Complex investments, K-1s, or anything resembling business income belong with an actual tax professional, not with someone who spent a career pointing people toward the reference stack instead of standing in it.

Does Every State Follow Indiana's Rules?

Indiana requires two witnesses on a will and skips the notary requirement for basic validity, though the self-proving version does need one. The state also refuses to recognize handwritten, unwitnessed wills, so notes scrawled in someone's own hand carry no legal weight here even if they carried plenty of the writer's actual intent. None of that is universal. Witness counts, notary rules, and how a state treats handwritten wills shift enough from state to state that I wrote up the Indiana two-witness rule separately rather than assume it applies wherever you're reading this from.

What Do Three Years of Doing This Myself Actually Add Up To?

Stack an attorney's hourly rate against a will, a healthcare directive, a power of attorney, a rental agreement, a sublease, and a tax return, and the total gets uncomfortable before anyone even bills for a follow-up call. Software handles the same list of documents for a cost you pay once or by the month, with no hourly rate attached to the questions you ask along the way. That's not an argument against attorneys. It's a description of what changes once nobody's billing by the quarter hour for a form you could fill out yourself.

If a death in your own family, or just the accumulation of a mortgage and a couple of kids, has you avoiding the whole subject because you assume it needs a law office, start with whichever document actually has a deadline attached, whether that's a healthcare directive before a surgery or a will before a trip. For the core of an estate plan, starting your draft with WillMaker gets you further than a free template pulled off a search result ever will, and it costs a fraction of what the same stack of documents runs at an hourly rate.