The Definitive Saturation.io Review
Recently, the marketing folks at Saturation saw my “Run The Numbers” series on Instagram, and decided to reach out. You’ll be happy to know that these tech bros are as kind and cool as can be. I tried out the product and absolutely loved it, so they set me up with an affiliate code. I’m secretly hoping this review goes to the moon and I make a bajillion dollars.
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What is Saturation?
Saturation is a budgeting software—specifically for video productions.
It also works great for photoshoots, social content captures, medium and large events, live plays and shows, and so much more.
But it’s designed mainly for commercial and film productions.
On the base level, it’s just a really intuitive budget software. Instead of cracking open a blank Google Sheet, then having to add all the formulas yourself (and hoping you don’t mess anything up), Saturation is just ready to go. You can easily add and delete rows, hide columns, and see your actual spending vs your estimate.
Beyond this, Saturation has a ton of tools for film industry professionals. It’s easy to share, it makes managing petty cash a breeze, and it’s really easy to toggle various versions of your budgets (which is great if you’re pitching budget tiers).
Why Saturation is so good for film and commercial productions
Saturation is so good for film and commercial productions for three main reasons:
Sharing
Customization
Integrations
Let’s discuss each in a little more depth.
What sharing options does saturation have?
Saturation is the best tool I’ve come across for sharing budgets with various team members. You can easily share specific portions of the budget with people, without sharing the whole budget. Many people ask, “how can I share one part of a budget without sharing the whole thing?” Saturation makes this possible. For example, I can share my art budget with the art department, and they can see everything they have to work with. Even cooler: they can add and edit lines while they shop, and it automatically applies to your main budget.
What customization options does Saturation have?
You can export well-designed PDF versions of your budget to share with a partner or a client. You can easily toggle various line items on and off. You can also export a dashboard of main costs per section.
For example, I often show my clients how much money I plan on spending for pre-production, production, post, rentals, etc. But I don’t want them to see the costs of every specific line item with that. Previously, I would have to manually create some kind of dashboard on Google Sheets. With Saturation, this view is really simple to toggle on and off, then share that view, or export as a PDF.
What integrations does Saturation have?
Saturation integrates with your bank using Plaid, it integrates with Quickbooks and with Wrapbook for Payroll, and with tons of other financial institutions to reduce redundancy. Saturation eliminates the redundant tasks that producers do.
For a full list of Saturations’s integrations, click here.
Is Saturation good for film industry pros?
Yes: it’s made for producers by producers, and that’s more than a tagline.
Almost every feature in Saturation is designed to reduce redundant tasks and make producers’ lives easier.
Here are (just a few) features for film industry pros:
Simple Fringe Tracking (to keep track of actual costs)
Easy to export quote tiers for pitches
Simple view of your Estimates vs Actuals
Virtual credit cards for petty cash (so your PAs stop bothering)
Integrations with Wrapbook, Movie Magic, Showbiz, Quickbooks, and more.
Receipt and reimbursement uploads (crew can do this for you!)
Sold yet? Click here to get 30 days of Saturation free.
How much does Saturation cost?
Saturation has three pricing tiers:
Creator ($0 per month)
Producer ($25 per month)
Production ($75 per month)
The Creator Tier (free) is great for getting started. You can create one budget with up to 1,000 line items, and you still have access to all the main features.
The Producer Tier ($25 per month) gives you access to integrations and collaboration features, 10,000 line items on unlimited projects, 100GB of storage, and expenses management.
The Production Tier ($75 per month) gives you access to everything from the Producer Tier, plus three seats, unlimited line items, 1TB of storage, accountant access, workspace collaboration, and more.
For Saturation’s full pricing, click here.
What is Saturation good at?
Saturation is good at making complex budgets easy to understand. It’s good at turning even the most spreadsheet-allergic person into a confident budgeter.
How does it do this?
Because it makes the user experience really simple, and it makes it impossible to break stuff. With Google Sheets or Hot Budget, it’s really easy to mess up formulas. You have to be proficient in these programs before you even begin. But you can learn Saturation on the fly because it’s very intuitive.
Saturation is also good at eliminating the redundant tasks that producers have to complete. For example, after a travel job, I usually open my business bank account, look at all the expenses from the travel and shoot days, copy and paste them over to my main budget, and hope I didn’t mess anything up. Afterward, I have to tell my bookkeeper what each of those random expenses were.
Instead, Saturation can just link directly to my bank account to import those random expenses. I can easily apply them to my projects. And then it can link to my Quickbooks, so my bookkeeper can be automatically. And it’s not any additional work, because I would have already been doing that inside my budget anyway.
With Saturation, my budget does a lot more.
Saturation vs Google Sheets
Saturation vs. Google Sheets…which one is better?
Before I made the switch to Saturation, I used Google Sheets for every single one of my budgets.
Even though Google Sheets is completely free, and you could technically program it to do most of what saturation does, Saturation is ten times easier to use. You have to build Google Sheets from the ground up. In order to make usable budget templates on Google Sheets, you have to learn lot of equations, formulas, and even some code. With Saturation, everything is pre-built for you.
If you want to make a change to Google Sheets, it’s easy to accidentally break something, or have the formula spit out the wrong number. I’ve broken Google Sheets a couple times, which had me accidentally under-quoting commercial production jobs. This was not a good look.
If it’s a cost thing, you don’t need to worry about that because Saturation’s Creator Tier is completely free. It gives you one seat on one project, with 1,000 line items, and up to 2GB of storage. If you need any more than that, you’re obviously working on some profitable projects, so the next tier at $25 per month is pretty easy to swallow considering all the time Saturation will save you.
Saturation vs Hot Budget (Microsoft Excel)
Before I made the switch to Saturation, I was using Google Sheets for virtually every project I ran. Occasionally, I worked with some older industry producer who reviewed my budgets. Every time, they would ask why I wasn’t using Hot Budget because it was “the industry standard.”
So one day I spent the $100 and downloaded Hot Budget (so I could fit in). Then realized I had to download Microsoft Excel to use Hot budget. So I downloaded Excel (it was like 3GB for some unknown reason), then I tried to launch hot Budget. Microsoft forced me to make an account (so they could spam me with 100 emails, probably). I made an account, then they made me (and this is not an exaggeration) do ten different “are you a robot” puzzles.
I wish I could tell you more about Hot Budget, but unfortunately, I never even made it that far. Hot Budget’s user experience was so terrible, I never even got the program running.
Saturation on the other hand, was actually created in this decade by people who care about UX and UI. I got up and running in no time, because everything was very intuitive. I created a simple budget in minutes, and started using Saturation’s more advanced features in less than an hour.
Saturation vs Notion
Notion is more of a project task management software, while Saturation is a budget software. Notion is difficult to customize to get all the normal things you need in a production budget. Meanwhile, Saturation has plenty of task management features, like adding comments for status updates, and crossing off those comments.
If you’re a producer, you could probably run a whole production just through Saturation, but you definitely couldn’t run a whole budget through Notion.
Is Saturation worth it?
The Creator version (the free version) of Saturation is definitely worth it for anybody. It’s a simple budgeting software that won’t waste your time.
The Producer Tiers and the Production Tiers are worth it if you’re pulling more than $5k-$10k in revenue from your production business annually. If you’re not yet making that much yet, you could probably get by with just the Creator Version.
Otherwise, if you’re making more, then yes, the Producer and Production Tiers of Saturation are well worth it. They’ll definitely save you more than one hour per month, and that’s all it will take for it to pay for itself.
Saturation discount
Click this link to get your first month of Saturation free!
