Every meeting has a price tag; most companies just refuse to look at it. A one-hour meeting with eight senior people on $150/hr blended cost is $1,200 — every week, that's $62,400 a year for one recurring meeting. This calculator makes the number visible. Add the attendees, set their hourly rates (or use the role-based defaults), pick the duration, and you get a live ticker showing the money burning while the meeting runs.
The actual cost is higher than the number you see
Two reasons:
1. Burdened cost vs. salary cost. A $100k salary costs the employer roughly $130–150k after taxes, benefits, equipment, office, and overhead. The role-based presets in this calculator already apply the standard 1.4x burden multiplier — if you're entering raw salaries, multiply by 1.4 first. 2. Context-switch cost. Every meeting fragments a maker's day. A 30-minute meeting in the middle of the morning doesn't cost 30 minutes — it costs the morning. This calculator doesn't try to model that, but you should mentally add 30–60 minutes per attendee for any meeting that breaks a deep-work block.
What to actually do with the number
Three concrete uses:
- Embed it on your meeting-request form. Force people to see the cost before they hit "send invite". Companies that do this see 20–40% drops in meeting volume.
- Put it in the calendar invite description. Just the number. No commentary needed.
- Use it as a Brita filter. Before accepting a recurring meeting, ask: "Is this $1,200/week of value?" If no, decline or move to async.
Embed it
We expose an embeddable widget at /embed/tools/meeting-cost-calculator you can drop into a Notion page, Confluence wiki, or internal tool. It carries a "Powered by LemTask" attribution, which is the price of free — but the widget is functional, not a teaser.
Pairs with
- Billable Hours Calculator — for the other side of the conversation, when *you're* the consultant the meeting is costing.
- ADHD Task Planner — meetings are the #1 reason ADHD-ers can't finish their three daily tasks; the cost calculator gives you the case for declining.
Why we built this
LemTask is a task manager. Tasks die in meetings. Anything we can ship that reduces meeting load is leverage on the actual product. So we built the calculator and shipped it free, on the assumption that the people most willing to use a meeting-cost-calculator are exactly the people who want a calmer task list — which is what LemTask sells.