Free indie film budgeting software, and where it stops working

Four families of tools describe themselves as free, and they are not free in the same way. A spreadsheet template is free without condition or expiry: you download it and it is yours. A trial is free in time — days or weeks, after which the work you started sits locked behind a payment. An entry tier is free in scope: one project, one seat, or a restricted export. Open source is free as a licence, which says nothing about hosting, configuration or the hours you spend keeping it running. Mixing these four up is the most common source of unpleasant surprises, because you pick a tool for a reason that does not apply to it.

This needs saying before anything is sold to you: on a ten-minute short shot over three days, a well-built spreadsheet is the correct tool. You have thirty-odd lines, two or three paid positions, one location, and the costing fits in an afternoon. Software would add nothing but a learning curve. The spreadsheet becomes a problem later, and for one reason only: it derives nothing. Fringes follow payroll, overhead and contingency follow the total, and those links live in formulas that a pasted value, an inserted row or a copy emailed to a co-producer is enough to break. The failure is never dramatic. The file keeps adding up — it just adds up to a different film than the one you are making.

Look at where the hours actually go on a costing. Not into typing amounts, but into the work that comes first: counting scenes, locations, cast members and the days each one works, listing costumes, vehicles, technical requirements. That screenplay breakdown is days of a line producer's time on a feature, and it is identical whether you are costing in a free spreadsheet or in a package at several hundred a month. Which is why comparing licence prices misses the point: a tool that does not do the breakdown leaves the entire bill with you, whatever it charges. Soldum has AI do that pass on the PDF or Final Draft you upload, you review and correct it, and the counts become budget lines carrying their unit, quantity and rate.

The tipping point has nothing to do with the size of the budget and everything to do with how often it changes. A budget built once and sent off as-is needs nothing more than a spreadsheet. A budget that lives — because the script is in rewrite, because a location falls through, because a co-producer joins and wants a different presentation — costs time at every revision, and that time is salary. Three signals mark the crossing, and they are easy to recognise: you no longer know which of the circulating versions is current; you decide not to cost a change because reworking the numbers would take the day; you rebuild by hand a table somebody asked for in another format.

Three questions separate a genuinely economical tool from a merely cheap one, and none of them is about money. Does the tool produce the quantities, or does it wait for you to supply them? Do the derived lines — fringes, overhead, contingency — recalculate, or do you have to remember them? Do the budget and the shooting schedule read the same data, or do you maintain consistency between two documents by hand? A tool that answers no three times is a spreadsheet with a nicer interface, and a free spreadsheet does the same job. The table below is the decision guide: find the row that describes you.

The trial lasts 7 days and it is complete: you upload a screenplay, AI breaks it down, you review it, and you get the budget, the shooting schedule and the logistics that go with them. Nothing is held back during the trial — a crippled trial answers no useful question, since the thing you want to know is whether the output is good on your own material. A card is required up front, and nothing is charged if you cancel before the seven days are up. Otherwise the subscription carries on at the plan you picked, billed per account rather than per seat: €49 excl. VAT per month on Solo for one active project at a time, €179 excl. VAT per month on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole team invited at no per-person cost, and 25% off on annual commitment. The least risky test is a film you have already made: compare the budget Soldum produces with the one you built by hand. A week is enough to do it.

During prep the question is almost never what the film costs, it is what this change costs. Losing a location, adding a night exterior, pushing the shoot by a month, swapping a crane for a dolly: each of those is decided in an afternoon, and the budget is updated long afterwards, when nothing can be traded any more. No free tool answers that question, because none of them knows the schedule — somebody has to translate the move into crew hours, extended rental, hotel nights and travel, then type the result in. In Soldum the budget and the shooting schedule are two views of the same data: you move the day, and the cost of moving it appears before you confirm.

This is the limit of working in files, and it has nothing to do with what the software costs. A financed project never has one budget. It has the one sent to the financier, the one that came back reduced, the one absorbing a partner who joined during the raise, and the one production is actually working to. With files all four exist at once, in inboxes, and nothing distinguishes them but a filename somebody remembered to change. Soldum keeps every version dated and named, but exactly one is approved at any moment, and that one is what the cost tracking measures against. The others stay readable without competing with it.

A budget is not only correct, it has to be readable by whoever receives it. Funds, broadcasters and co-producers each have a presentation they read fluently, and rebuilding it by hand at every revision burns exactly the time you thought you were saving upstream. A template found online is rarely in that format, and never updated when expectations move. It matters most where the structure is imposed rather than suggested: productions shooting in France, for instance, are read in a normalised set of numbered budget series rather than a house layout, and Soldum produces that presentation directly alongside standard Excel and PDF exports. Requirements and thresholds differ between funders and change over time — check the current rules with the body concerned before filing.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your screenplay: the text is imported, not drafted here. It is not a general accounting package — journals, ledgers and statutory accounts stay with your accountant, who receives the cost tracking as an export. It does not run payroll: the budget computes gross pay and the charges on it, but payslips are issued elsewhere. It files nothing with a funder on your behalf and guarantees no application. And it is not free beyond the 7-day trial: if your need amounts to costing one film every couple of years, a template will serve you better, and this page has saved you time by saying so.