Why meeting cost matters
A typical 30-minute team meeting with five mid-level engineers costs hundreds of dollars in salary alone. Multiply that by every recurring weekly meeting, and the bill adds up fast. Putting a number on it doesn't mean meetings are bad — it means the bar for which meetings happen, and who needs to be in them, should be deliberate.
The point of this tool isn't to shame people out of meetings. It's to give organizers a quick gut-check: is this 60-minute, 12-person status update worth $1,500 of salary time, or could a five-line written update do the same job?
How to estimate hourly rates
If you don't know everyone's exact salary, use a fully-loaded hourly rate — what each person actually costs the company once you include benefits, taxes, equipment, and overhead. A common rule of thumb is base salary × 1.4. So a $150,000-base engineer is roughly $100/hr fully loaded.
For mixed-seniority groups, take a weighted average. For external attendees, use their billable rate. The numbers don't have to be perfect to be useful — directionally correct beats precisely wrong.
Reading the live ticker
Start the ticker when the meeting actually begins (not when it was scheduled to begin — late starts are part of the cost too). Pause when the topic shifts to one that doesn't need everyone. Reset between meetings.
The "per-second" and "per-minute" lines are the most useful numbers in the widget. When you see "this meeting is burning $1.50 every second," the value of cutting tangents becomes very concrete.