Silverstack alternative: one-time offload without the yearly subscription
Pomfort Silverstack is excellent software. For many crews the question isn’t whether it’s good — it’s whether they need everything it does, every year, at subscription price.
What Silverstack costs, and why people look
Silverstack runs about $399/year, and Silverstack XT about $599/year. Over three years that’s roughly $1,200–1,800. If you’re a full DIT cart doing grading, LUTs, dailies and library management daily, that can be money well spent. If what you actually need on set is rock-solid offload, verification, ASC MHL and a report to hand to production, you may be renting a station to use one room of it.
What you keep with a one-time tool
The offload core — the part nobody’s footage can do without — doesn’t need to be a subscription:
- Verified copies to multiple drives at once, checked by reading each file back off the disk.
- ASC MHL v2 written alongside the media so post can re-verify without your software. (What ASC MHL is.)
- Multiple checksum algorithms — xxHash, MD5, SHA-256, C4 — for whatever a facility requires. (Checksum verification explained.)
- Reports — PDF, CSV and ALE — for editorial and production.
Olycen does exactly this for $129 once, two Macs, no subscription. Your license is a signed file on your Mac; it never expires and never checks in with anyone.
Where Silverstack is still the answer
Be honest with yourself about the job. If you need grading and look management, dailies with sound, a searchable media library, or the deep on-set review tools, Silverstack is a full station and Olycen is not trying to be one. For a high-end episodic or feature cart, that breadth can be worth the yearly cost.
Where Olycen fits
If your set work is offload → verify → MHL → report → deliver, and you’d rather own the tool than rent it, that’s the trade Olycen is built for. See the pricing or join the beta and run it beside Silverstack on a real card — if they ever disagree on a checksum, that’s the most valuable thing you can send us.
Prices are Pomfort’s published figures as of mid-2026 and can change — check their site before you decide.
Keep reading: Best SD card offload software for Mac (2026) · Olycen vs OffShoot, ShotPut Pro and Silverstack
Offload that never lies to you.
Olycen copies every card to as many drives as you want, verifies each file by reading it back, and only says the word verified once the proof is in. One-time $129, two Macs, no subscription — the launch list pays $99.