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What does this meeting cost?
Trippi Notes team · facts checked on 2026-10-01
A meeting does not show up on any invoice, so it feels cheap. It is not: an hour with six people is six hours of paid work. Put in the people, the pay and the length, and see the number. Or start the counter when the meeting starts and watch it grow.
This meeting costs about
$300
Live counter
$0.0000:00
Start it when the meeting starts. It uses the people and pay above.
The assumption, stated plainly. A yearly salary is turned into an hourly rate by dividing it by 1,800 working hours, which is roughly 40 hours a week for 45 weeks. Change that number if your year looks different. A salary is also not the whole cost of a person to an employer: taxes, benefits and office costs come on top, so the real cost is usually higher than this. Everything is calculated in your browser; nothing is sent.
How the number is worked out
The sum is simple: people × hourly rate × minutes ÷ 60. Six people at 50 an hour for 60 minutes is 300. If that meeting happens every week, it is 15,600 over 52 weeks.
If you know yearly salaries rather than hourly rates, switch to Yearly salary. The calculator divides the salary by the working hours in a year, 1,800 unless you change it. Use an average for the room: you do not need anyone’s real salary to see whether a meeting is worth its price.
The live counter does the same sum second by second. Start it when the call begins, pause it for a break, and reset it for the next meeting. It runs in this tab only.
What the number leaves out
- Preparation. Reading the papers, making the slides, finding the numbers someone will ask about.
- Getting back to work. A half-hour meeting in the middle of a morning often costs more than half an hour of focused work.
- Waiting. Decisions that wait for the next meeting hold up the people who need them.
- Value. A meeting that settles a hard question in an hour may be the cheapest way to settle it. The number tells you the price, not whether it was worth it.
What makes a meeting cheaper
- An agenda, sent before. Say what must be decided, not just what will be discussed. People come ready, and the meeting can end when the decision is made.
- Fewer people. Invite the people who decide and the people who will do the work. Everyone else can read the minutes in three minutes instead of sitting through sixty.
- A shorter slot. Book 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60. Work tends to fill the time it is given, and meetings are no different.
- Minutes sent the same day. Clear minutes with decisions and owners stop the second meeting that only exists to remember the first. See how to write meeting minutes.
- A follow-up that names owners and dates. “Anna sends the copy by Friday” gets done; “we should look at the copy” does not. The follow-up email guide has templates.
- Cancelling a recurring meeting with nothing on it. An empty agenda is a good reason to give everyone their hour back.
Should you show the counter in the meeting?
Some teams put a running cost on the screen to keep meetings short. It works for some and feels like pressure to others. A gentler use is to run it privately, and bring the number to the team once, when you suggest a shorter slot or fewer people for a recurring meeting.
The point is not to make people feel guilty about meeting. It is to make the cost visible, so that the agenda, the guest list and the minutes get the care that money would get.
Where Trippi Notes helps
Trippi Notes will not make a meeting shorter by itself. What it removes is the note-taking job. It writes the transcript of a call in a browser tab with speaker names and times, on Google Meet, Zoom in the browser and Microsoft Teams in the browser. From it you get a summary with decisions, tasks with owners and open questions, and a follow-up email draft to send from your own mail.
That makes “read the minutes instead of attending” a real option for the people who only need the outcome. The summary is written by a model, so read it before you send it, and it works only for calls in a browser tab.
FAQ
Asked about this.
Which hourly rate should I use?+
An average for the people in the room is enough. If you know salaries, switch to Yearly salary and the calculator turns them into an hourly rate.
Why 1,800 working hours a year?+
It is our rounded assumption: about 40 hours a week for 45 weeks, after holidays and days off. Your country or contract may differ, so the field can be changed.
Does the result include taxes and benefits?+
No. It uses pay only. The full cost of employing someone is higher, so treat the result as the lower end.
Is anything I type sent anywhere?+
No. The sums are done in your browser, and nothing is stored after you close the tab.
How do I work out the cost of a recurring meeting?+
The result already shows the cost over 52 weeks for a weekly meeting. For a daily stand-up, multiply the cost of one meeting by the number of working days.
Read next
Spend the meeting on the meeting.
Trippi Notes is in the Chrome Web Store. One click on the icon when the call begins, and nothing before that.