Build the whole story
on one canvas.

Yes. Beat is completely free, with no account, no tracking, and no upsell, and it is never going to be for sale. I built it for myself and I give it away. It does cost something to stay free: Apple charges 99 dollars a year for the developer account that lets me sign and notarise Beat, which is what makes it install cleanly instead of throwing a warning at you. I pay for it. There is nothing to buy here and there never will be, but that is where the money goes.

Many people use it that way. Beat puts story beats, references, characters, locations, a shot list that reads from your beats, call sheets, an overhead lighting and blocking diagram and a full shoot-day mode on one visual canvas, and it imports Fountain and Final Draft screenplays, so it covers a lot of what people reach for paid tools like StudioBinder, Shot Designer or Milanote to do, without a subscription.

An overhead scene planner you attach to any beat. It has cameras with a real field of view by focal length, real fixtures like softbox, fresnel, LED and china ball, and light that bounces, blocks and diffuses through cards, flags, walls and windows. Every symbol is drawn at real-world scale, a car is 4.5 m and a chair is half a metre. It is a proper lighting and blocking diagram you can export as an image.

It connects to Claude through MCP, so the AI works on your real project rather than copied and pasted text. In 2.0 it can build a whole project: create it, write the beats and groups, place images, build linked shot lists, dress set plans and export treatments, and it checks its own work for errors. It is optional, and Beat works fully without it.

A zip of all your media in tidy folders, a Markdown file of the whole project with prompts built in for any AI chat, a Word document organized exactly as you built it, and PDF overviews and storyboards. Version 2.0 adds call sheets, wrap reports, printable day sheets, a treatment export and a print-ready page layout, alongside the shot list, production breakdown sheets and Fountain screenplay export from before.

Yes. Beat is a universal app that runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, on modern macOS. It is signed and notarised by Apple, so it installs the way any other Mac app does: download, drag to Applications, open. No warning, no right click, no trip through System Settings, and no Apple account needed.

Download it, then drop your story beats onto the canvas, or drop a screenplay and let the board build itself. Pin references next to them, add your characters and locations, build a Set Plan for the shots you want staged a specific way, and let the shot list read from your beats. Beat writes the call sheet, you run the day from On set, and one button wraps it with a report. It is all free.