SoundScope is a planning & estimation tool for game audio budgets and team scope. It translates a project's shape — genre, platform, scale, timeline — into a defensible cost range and a team plan that can actually deliver it.
What it does:
- Estimates internal salary cost (CoL-adjusted by city) and external vendor cost (per-asset / per-minute / monthly)
- Checks whether your headcount can actually produce the scope in the time available — flags over-capacity teams
- Surfaces risks: missing audio programmer, undefined middleware, unrealistic VO line counts, etc.
- Compares your target audio budget to the calculated estimate (advanced mode)
Who it's for: Audio Directors, Producers, Studio Heads, and indie devs who need a budget number for a publisher pitch — or a sanity check on the one they were given.
How to use it: Basic view (small studios, quick estimates) asks ~7 questions and infers the rest. Advanced view exposes per-role headcount, per-asset SFX/music/VO counts, vendor mix, and the budget-vs-estimate delta. Toggle in the top right.
Your data & privacy: SoundScope is a single, fully client-side tool. Everything you enter stays in your browser and is never sent to or stored on a server — there is no server-side.
- Project inputs (genre, tier, budget, headcount, scope numbers, quality bars — everything) live in memory in this browser tab only. Never transmitted anywhere. Cleared on refresh or tab close.
- Persistent storage: a small number of items are saved locally on your device — your Basic / Advanced view preference, your list of named projects, the active project's ID, and each project's autosaved inputs. All of this stays on your device and is never sent anywhere. Use the Project menu in the header to create / duplicate / rename / delete projects, save a portable JSON copy, or reset.
- No backend, no database, no accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no telemetry. No data is collected.
- Feedback button opens your own email client via a
mailto: link — sending is your explicit choice, through your own email provider.
- PDF export uses your browser's built-in print-to-PDF. The file is generated locally and saved by you; nothing leaves the browser.
Honest caveats: the page loads two web fonts from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com) — the only third-party request, which Google can log (IP, timestamp, referrer). And as with any website, the host's web server keeps standard access logs (IP, timestamp, which file was requested) — that's request metadata, not your project data, and the site owner controls its retention.
© 2026 James Ackley · Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free for personal & non-commercial use with attribution. Rehosting, redistributing, modifying, or commercial use requires written permission. Estimates are reference figures only — not a professional bid, contract, or financial advice. Contact: soundscope@exackley.com