Soldum: the StudioBinder alternative that starts at the script

Keeping the paperwork of a shoot straight used to mean a shared folder where everyone dropped their own version. StudioBinder took that problem seriously: a polished interface, clean call sheets sent from inside the tool, shot lists and storyboards gathered in one place, a crew contact list that feeds every document, and collaboration that works without anyone exporting anything. For a production used to working in English, it is a reference point, and nothing below claims otherwise. The comparison is not decided there.

This is the distinction that settles the choice, and it is easy to miss because both tools show you similar screens. A production management platform assumes the documents exist: somebody read the script, counted the scenes per location, listed the characters and the days they work, noted the technical requirements, and then carried all of it into the forms. That work — the screenplay breakdown — is what costs a line producer days, not the formatting that follows. As long as it happens somewhere else, in a spreadsheet or on paper, the tool is neatly filing manual data entry. Soldum targets exactly that: you upload a PDF or a Final Draft file, AI extracts the substance of the film, and the documents are built on a breakdown you have reviewed.

In Soldum the breakdown is not an end in itself: it is the source the other documents flow from. A location extracted from the script becomes a number of shooting days, so a block in the schedule and a transport line; a character becomes days worked, so call times on the matching call sheets and a fee in the budget; a technical requirement noted in a scene becomes an equipment line. None of that is copied from one screen to another — it is read in one place. That continuity is what makes the difference in daily use, more than the accuracy of the initial extraction: a correct but isolated breakdown still forces you to carry every change by hand into the schedule, then the call times, then the costing.

Automation is only worth having if you can trust what it hands back, and a screenplay is full of things a model can read the wrong way: a location named two different ways forty pages apart, a character who appears only in a line of action, a prop implied rather than written. Soldum treats the AI pass as a first draft, not a verdict. Nothing is applied without your approval: you review the breakdown scene by scene, correct what was misread, add what the text leaves implicit, and the corrected version is what the schedule and the budget are built from. That review is where the real saving is decided — hours where manual entry takes days, and the condition for everything downstream to be dependable.

A production management platform covers the shoot paperwork well and traditionally leaves detailed costing to another tool. In practice that means a spreadsheet or a budgeting application living alongside it, fed by hand from the same breakdown, and two things to keep consistent for the whole of prep. Every decision then gets paid for twice — once in the schedule, once in the budget — with the standing risk that one of the two updates is forgotten, and that the film the budget describes stops being the film the schedule describes. In Soldum the budget is another view of the same material as the schedule: quantities come from the breakdown, days come from the schedule, and there is no second file to maintain.

The question worth asking of any tool is how many others you still need around it. Covering the documents well means the breakdown often lives in a spreadsheet and the costing in a third product — three places, three exports, three chances for them to disagree. The cost of that split never appears on a feature list; it shows up as the afternoon someone spends reconciling a schedule with a budget that no longer matches it. Soldum covers the whole preparation from a single source: what the AI extracted feeds the schedule, the call sheets and the budget at once, and a change made in one of them is a change in all of them.

In preparation the question is almost never what the film costs, but what this change costs. Losing the week-three location, adding a night shoot, pushing the start date by a month: each of those is decided in a couple of hours, while the budget is only updated much later, when nothing is negotiable any more. A tool that holds the schedule but not the costing cannot answer — a human has to translate the move into crew hours, hotel nights and transport, then type the result in somewhere else. In Soldum the schedule and the budget are two views of the same material: you move the day, and the cost of moving it appears before you approve anything.

The call sheet is the document the crew actually reads, and the only one whose errors show up the next morning in the car park. Filled in by hand, however good the interface, it restates what the schedule already knows: the day's scenes, the locations, the cast called, the technical requirements, the times. Every restatement is a chance to diverge — a call time changed in the schedule and not on the sheet, and somebody travels for nothing. In Soldum the call sheet is generated from the shooting schedule, and a moved day regenerates the call times it affects. It stays editable, of course: what we remove is the re-entry, not the control.

How a production tool is billed decides who gets access to it, and therefore how useful it really is. Billed per seat, it pushes you to ration accounts: the location manager reads a PDF somebody exported, the trainee works on a copy, and the shared database stops being shared. Soldum is billed per account — €49/month excl. VAT on Solo for one active project at a time, €179/month excl. VAT on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole team invited at no cost per person, and 25% off with an annual commitment. The 7-day free trial gives you time to break down a first script before paying. It is not only a price question: a tool everyone can open is the only one where one person's correction benefits the rest.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write scripts and offers neither a text editor, nor storyboards, nor shot lists: on visual planning shot by shot, StudioBinder does work we do not do, and that is a legitimate reason to prefer it. Scripts are uploaded here, not drafted. We do not cover dailies, editing or sound post-production, and we are not corporate accounting software: ledgers and statutory accounts stay with your accountant, who receives an export rather than a replacement. We do not run payroll either — the budget calculates gross pay and employer costs, but producing the payslips happens elsewhere. Soldum's scope is preparation, from the script arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot, plus budget tracking during it.

There is no data migration to orchestrate: Soldum starts from the script. You export your text as PDF or Final Draft, you upload it, and the breakdown runs. In practice the most common migration is not really one — teams try Soldum on the preparation of a real project, ideally one already finished whose schedule and final cost they know, and compare what the tool produces with what they built by hand. It is the least risky test, since you compare two outputs on the same script without dismantling anything. The table below sets out where to start depending on your situation.

Production companies, producers of features, documentaries, commercials and series, and line producers who spend their days keeping a breakdown, a schedule, a set of call sheets and a budget consistent with one another. Soldum also builds budgets on French industry rates and the standardised cost categories French financiers expect — a concrete advantage if you shoot in France or co-produce with a French partner, and simply neutral otherwise. If your first need is visual planning — storyboards, shot lists, prepping the images with the director — the argument falls away: StudioBinder remains the coherent choice, and nothing stops you preparing the film in Soldum upstream and exporting what has to move across.