Soldum: the Yamdu alternative that starts from the screenplay

Yamdu grew out of the need to hold an entire production in one place: shooting days, locations, contacts, contractual documents, budgets and crew distribution. That breadth is its real strength. On a feature or a series where several departments work in parallel, a single reference point avoids the scattering into spreadsheets and email threads. The trade-off is openly acknowledged by the vendor: the platform has to be configured and learned before it starts paying off.

This is the most useful distinction for making a decision, and it is easy to miss. A management platform gives you the fields to file information into; someone still has to fill them. The breakdown is the step that produces that information, scene by scene, and it is the step that costs a production manager days of work. Soldum targets exactly that: you upload a PDF or a Final Draft file, AI extracts scenes, sets, characters, extras, costumes, props and technical needs, and you review a database that is already populated instead of typing into an empty one.

Both tools cover the run-up to the shoot, but they do not start in the same place, and that is what should drive the choice rather than a feature count. The table below sets out the split as plainly as we can put it, including the cases where Soldum is not the right answer.

In Soldum the breakdown is not an end in itself: it is the source the other documents flow from. Sets, characters, costumes and technical needs extracted from the screenplay feed the budget and the shooting schedule directly. Move a scene and the schedule recalculates, the travel budget follows, the accommodation nights adjust, and the affected call sheets are regenerated. That propagation is what makes the difference in daily use — more than the accuracy of the initial extraction, because a correct but isolated breakdown still forces you to carry every revision by hand into three other files.

The question is not whether a tool is sold by subscription, but what the subscription counts: projects, users, exports. Most platforms count seats, so opening the tool to the location manager, the first AD and the production office costs money on every addition — which pushes teams to restrict access, the exact opposite of what a shared reference point is for. Soldum bills the account, not the seat. Studio at €479/month excl. VAT covers unlimited projects and invites your whole team at no extra cost; Solo at €149/month excl. VAT suits companies preparing one film at a time. An annual commitment takes 25% off, and the free tier lets you break down a first screenplay before committing.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write screenplays and offers neither a text editor nor a storyboard: the script is imported, not drafted here. We do not cover editorial post-production, and we do not claim to match the depth of a production management platform for tracking documents across a three-hundred-person crew. The scope is preparation, from the screenplay arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot, plus budget tracking during it.

There is no data migration to orchestrate: Soldum starts from the screenplay. 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 phase of a real project, breaking it down, costing it and scheduling it, while keeping their existing tool for what it already does well. It is the least risky path, since you compare two outputs on the same screenplay without dismantling anything.

Production companies, producers of short films, documentaries, commercials and music videos, and production managers who spend their days keeping a breakdown, a budget and a schedule consistent with one another. Soldum is built on French industry rates and budget categories, which is a concrete advantage if you shoot in France or co-produce with French partners, and simply neutral otherwise. If your first need is document coordination across a very large international crew, a dedicated management platform remains the coherent choice.