Free film budget builder. A proper topsheet.
Pick a template (short film, indie feature, commercial or music video), fill in your line items, and the sections, contingency and grand total compute as you type. Download a one-page topsheet PDF, the full detailed budget, and a CSV. Free, with no account to create, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Build your budgetYour work is saved as you go, so you can close this tab and pick it up later. Rates are left for you to fill in: they vary too much by region for a template to guess honestly.
What are you budgeting?
Each template loads the category structure and line items that kind of production expects. You can rename, add and remove everything afterwards.
Sources & how this tool works
The templates follow standard production practice: the short film and feature structures mirror the categories line producers use (the feature adds account-style codes and above and below the line grouping), the commercial template follows the bid-style categories agencies expect through to the production fee line, and the music video template runs pre-production to label deliverables. Percentages such as contingency are computed on the budget subtotal.
Everything is generated locally in your browser: this tool makes no network requests, so your figures are never sent to or stored on our servers. Your draft is kept in this browser’s local storage only.
A budget that has to track actuals, purchase orders, fringes and payroll deserves real budgeting software, which is exactly what InteScene’s budget is for; the CSV this tool exports imports straight into it.
Quick answers
Is this film budget builder really free?
Yes, completely free, with no account to create and no credit card. The finished PDFs carry one small "made with InteScene" line in the footer, and nothing else is added to them.
What happens to the numbers I type in?
They stay in your browser. This tool makes no network requests at all: the PDFs and the CSV are generated on your device, so your figures, rates and vendor names are never uploaded to our servers. A draft is kept in your browser storage on this device so a refresh does not lose your work.
Why are the rates empty in the templates?
Deliberately. Crew rates, equipment prices and location fees vary enormously by country, city, union status and year, so pre-filled numbers would be wrong for most people and would date badly. The templates give you the structure and the line items productions usually forget (insurance, hard drives, the festival DCP); the figures are yours.
What is a budget topsheet?
The topsheet is the one-page summary at the front of a production budget: every category with its total, the subtotal, percentages such as contingency, and the grand total. It is the page financiers, funds and commissioners actually read, with the detailed pages behind it as backup.
How much contingency should a film budget include?
Ten percent of the budget subtotal is the widely used starting point, and it is what the film templates preload. Financiers often expect to see it, and completion bonds usually require it. Commercials work differently: the bid usually carries a production fee or markup percentage instead, which is how the commercial template is set up.
Can it convert between currencies?
No, and that is deliberate: the currency selector (GBP, USD, EUR) changes the symbol on your numbers, not the numbers themselves. A live exchange rate would go stale between writing the budget and spending it, so an honest free tool labels your figures and leaves conversion to you.
The estimate is the easy part. Track the spend.
InteScene's budget reaches chart-of-accounts depth next to your script and schedule: Estimated, Actual, Paid, Payable and Variance on every line, with purchase orders and live cost feeds from the shoot.