- What's the formula?
- Total cost = (duration in minutes ÷ 60) × Σ (hourly rate × count) for every attendee row. Cost per minute = total cost ÷ duration. Cost per hour (the 'burn rate') = Σ (hourly rate × count). The per-role breakdown is the same formula applied row by row, then summed for the headline — so the numbers in the breakdown always add to the total within a cent of rounding.
- What's a 'fully-loaded' hourly rate?
- Salary alone underestimates the true cost of a person. Fully loaded means salary + employer payroll taxes + health and retirement benefits + equipment + office overhead. The widely-cited heuristic is salary × 1.25 to 1.4 depending on benefits richness — for a $150,000 engineer, that's roughly $90 to $100 per hour in fully-loaded terms. Using gross hourly salary instead of fully-loaded hourly will systematically understate the meeting's real cost by 25-40%.
- Where do the $4.50 latte and $800 office-day numbers come from?
- The $4.50 latte is the mid-2025 US average chain coffee price (Starbucks medium latte sits at ~$5.75, blue-collar diner coffee at ~$3, average between). The $800 office day is a 2024 estimate of fully-loaded daily cost per US knowledge worker — derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics 'total compensation per hour worked' figures multiplied by 8 hours, then rounded. Both are order-of-magnitude anchors for sanity-checking your total, not financial advice.
- How is this different from Harvard Business Review's meeting cost calculator?
- HBR's calculator (and Atlassian's, and most clones) asks for one average rate across everyone — which is fine for back-of-envelope but loses the per-role breakdown. Real meetings are mixed: a director at $120/hr plus four engineers at $80/hr plus a designer at $85/hr is not the same as six people at $90/hr. Our calculator models each row separately so you can see exactly who and what is costing what — and decide whether the director actually needs to be there.
- Does the live ticker keep running if I close the tab?
- No — the ticker is browser-local and stops when the tab closes. There's no server, no account, no saved state. If you want to capture the running total for a Slack thread or follow-up email, screenshot it before you close the tab. We chose not to persist anything because (a) most users want this for a single meeting, not a longitudinal log, and (b) we don't want to track who's running this against whose name. Pause and resume during the meeting works fine — just leave the tab open.
- What rate should I use for myself or for unpaid attendees?
- For employees: their fully-loaded hourly rate. For contractors: their invoiced rate (no benefits markup). For unpaid attendees (interns, volunteers, board members serving pro bono): zero is honest — the meeting still costs the paid people in the room, and zero rows still count toward the total head count. The calculator accepts $0 rates explicitly. The reason to keep them visible in the breakdown is that 'one director plus seven unpaid observers' is still useful information about how the meeting is being used.
- Why isn't this just a feature in Google Calendar?
- It should be, and it isn't. Google Calendar knows who you're meeting with, when, and for how long; it could surface the cost as easily as the agenda. The reason it doesn't is that Big Software optimizes for adoption and engagement — and showing managers that their weekly 1-hour all-hands costs the company $30,000/year doesn't drive more meetings. So we built this microapp instead, and we don't need to know your calendar to do it. Three numbers, one screen, no login.
- Should I actually cancel meetings based on this number?
- Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A 60-minute meeting that costs $1,500 and produces a decision worth $50,000 is cheap. A weekly status meeting that costs $30,000/year and could have been a 200-word Slack post is expensive. The calculator's job isn't to make a value judgment — it's to make the cost legible enough that you can make the value judgment yourself. The standard prompts are: would I expense an $800 dinner for this conversation? Would I authorize a $1,500 software purchase to capture this information? If the answers diverge from how readily the meeting was scheduled, that's the gap worth examining.
- Does this work for global teams with different currencies?
- The calculator displays dollars and uses dollar anchors, but the math doesn't care about currency — if you enter all rates in pounds, the total comes back in 'pounds' (just visually labeled $). For a clean answer in your local currency, enter rates in that currency and mentally substitute the symbol. For mixed-currency teams (a Tokyo engineer plus a London engineer plus a New York engineer), convert each to a common currency at current FX before entering. We didn't build per-row currency conversion because it adds UI complexity for a feature most users don't need.
