Live Meeting Cost Calculator
Watch the real cost of a meeting tick up second by second. Enter attendees, salary, and length to see the live cost, the full-meeting cost, the annualized cost if it recurs, and what that money could buy.
How to use this tool
- Enter the number of attendees and the average annual salary per person.
- Set the meeting length in minutes and pick how often it recurs.
- Press Start to watch the cost accrue live, second by second.
- Read the full-meeting cost, the annualized cost, and the “what this buys” line.
- Copy the page URL to share the exact scenario with your team.
Most “meeting cost calculators” just multiply a few numbers and stop. This one makes the cost visceral: hit Start and the dollar figure ticks up in real time, the same way the meeting is actually burning payroll. It is built for the person who wants to drop a hard number into a “does this need to be a meeting?” conversation.
Beyond the live timer it adds two things existing tools miss: a recurring-meeting projection (a one-hour weekly sync is really 52 of these a year) and a “what this buys” framing that converts the cost into coffees and days of an engineer’s salary — because $3,400 means more when it’s 4 days of headcount. Share the URL and your teammate sees the exact same numbers.
Frequently asked questions
- How is the per-second cost calculated?
- Each attendee’s annual salary is divided by 2,080 working hours per year to get an hourly rate, then by 3,600 to get cost per second, summed across all attendees. Salary is a stand-in for fully-loaded cost; real loaded cost (benefits, overhead) is often 1.25–1.4× higher.
- What does the annualized number mean?
- If you mark the meeting as recurring, the tool multiplies the full-meeting cost by how often it happens in a year (weekly × 52, monthly × 12, daily × 260 working days). A modest weekly standup can quietly cost tens of thousands of dollars per year.
- Is anything sent to a server?
- No. Everything runs in your browser. The inputs are stored only in the page URL so you can share or bookmark a scenario — nothing is uploaded.