Hello Product Hunt! We’re excited to introduce you to Meeting Cost Calculator, our new tool to help teams understand their meeting culture through data. We built Meeting Cost Calculator because our own team realized that we were spending a ton of time in meetings that seemed only marginally productive. This tool was built to evaluate whether we were truly wasting time. (Hint: we absolutely were!) After dogfooding the product within our own org, we realized that simply by making team members more aware of the cost of meetings, we were able to encourage more considered scheduling and time use. In fact, our closed beta has demonstrated an average 39% reduction in meeting time resulting in a 28% increase in productivity! Now we think this early version of Meeting Cost Calculator is AES encrypted and ready for the spotlight. (We have plenty more to come too!) Hit us up with any feedback, love, or constructive criticism. We look forward to hearing from you!

I am SO excited about Meeting Cost Calculator and hunting this launch. I've been personally noodling on this concept for years, so when I discovered @kevjord @amongmany @bgibson @jmpaul_astro @cvlvn had built this, I couldn't help but ask to help out. While I've spent ~20 years of my career in startups where meetings aren't usually *too* big a problem, my time at CBS, Etsy, and WarnerMedia was basically almost non-stop meetings. I love the concept of getting managers (and employees) to get a real understanding of the actual cost to the *organization*. Rarely can you truly address the impact of (1) having too many people in meetings and (2) having too many meetings in general but also (3) having individuals spending so much of their time stuck in meetings as well. I've actually been using it for my startup's product (Augie AI Assisted Video Editing) - it makes "this could've been an email" very very poignant! The onboarding was super easy - it even includes external meetings for me (so I can see how much it's cost me to do all my pitching!) So go ahead, check out Meeting Cost Calculator, and let's all save time, and money, for our companies!

Wow, nice product! This will help many companies realize that most of the meetings are useless. 👍 On the tech side and for business, I wonder if you've gone through the Google security audit 🔒 to integrate your app with the Google Calendar API? 📅

I always wanted to make something like this! I love it. I feel like my current team generally does a good job at managing meetings, so I'm not sure i'd want to use it at the moment, but I'm definitely saving this in the future because i wished we had this tool in previous roles where i felt our meetings were out of control and i didn't have any data to really show it.

Amazing concept. Would you plan to release a pluggable API for other tools to send you some data & you can return the cost to them that they can use in their own projects to run some reports?

As the Head of Engineering, my patience for excessive meetings is already hanging by a thread. So, when we started working on the Meeting Cost Calculator late last year, it felt less like a new venture and more like a personal mission. Tom Goodwin's words on LinkedIn were the icing on the cake, "These days it's harder to expense a Twix from a hotel mini bar, than it is to call a meeting that costs $20,000 of other peoples' time." Damn straight. Let's face it, we're running businesses where the largest outflow of resources is tied up in people, and yet, we rarely evaluate how their time – our most valuable asset – is being spent beyond performance reviews. That's like checking the tire pressure of your car while ignoring a smoking engine. Absurd, right? Hence, Meeting Cost Calculator. Born out of a sense of growing frustration and the need to turn the tide on unproductive meeting culture. It's not about putting a dollar sign on people's heads or shaming them into fewer meetings. It's a wake-up call to the sheer expense of a lousy meeting culture in today's remote and hybrid workforce scenario. Throughout the beta period, we’ve crunched the numbers, and the returns are staggering. We and a handful of other brave companies have put Meeting Cost Calculator to the test, and we're psyched to finally roll it out. As we continue to tinker under the hood and queue up new features for release, your feedback will be the grease that keeps this engine running smoothly. Don't just take it for a spin, tell us what works, what grinds your gears, and help us shape the roadmap. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Great tool guys, very useful nowadays

Congrats on the launch! Upvoted.

That sounds like a great tool to help businesses optimize their meeting time and ensure that their meetings are productive!💯

Very useful solution, at this moment we use one of your competitors - but insights that those type of platforms can provide are amazing, we reduce spends on a meetings.

Congrats on the launch

Great idea! Congrats on the launch

This Meeting Cost Calculator seems like a great tool to bring accountability to meetings. Congrats on the launch 🚀🚀

Interesting, useful perspective idea! I may not have delved into all the functions of the product enough, but I will share my opinion. 1. Provide for the possibility of conducting a closed evaluation of the effectiveness of the meeting from the meeting participants, company management, performers in order to understand the cost effectiveness of the meeting or increase its effectiveness. 2. Provide an opportunity to calculate the cost of meetings not only from wages. 3. Ability to sort meetings into one-time and cyclic. 4. Adding an alert indicator for exceeding the meeting limit adopted by the company.

My big congrats to you! Upvoted.

Kudos to the team for making such a great product!

This looks amazing and really helpful! As a cross-functional team lead and brand manager in CPG companies, being cognizant of meeting attendees and frequency, especially those that involve our Production team is always on top of mind. This will be a fantastic way to shed light to drive more efficiency to projects, to think more critically for each of the team members before inviting others to meetings, as well as the meeting duration and frequency. Time is an extremely valuable resource that is often overlooked, so I'm excited how this tool will help create opportunities to be more productive and everyone to "get time back in their lives."

When we started working on Meeting Cost Calculator late last year, we were inspired to take action by a note that Tom Goodwin posted on LinkedIn, "These days it's harder to expense a Twix from a hotel mini bar, than it is to call a meeting that costs $20,000 of other peoples' time." And he's right — companies today are so focused on the minutiae that they sometimes loose track of the bigger picture. People are the biggest resource expenditure for many companies, but few consider how the time they're paying for is being spent outside of individual performance reviews. We built Meeting Cost Calculator to help team leaders understand meeting culture across their teams and streamline meeting activities to align to the realities of today’s connected (and often remote/hybrid) workforce. Revealing meeting costs isn’t about “shaming” employees into fewer meetings, but rather adding a tool to the arsenal that allows trust, accountability, and informed decision-making. We’ve seen huge returns throughout the beta period as we and a few trusted companies have put Meeting Cost Calculator through its paces, and today we’re immensely excited to share it with the world. We have new features planned for release very soon, and we’re looking forward to getting feedback and thoughts from early users to better inform our roadmap. Thank you for checking us out!

Always wondered how much those long meetings cost us? Finally, a tool that lets us quantify and track meeting costs, helping us be more productive and mindful about the time we spend in meetings. Congratulations! 🌟

Hey there! I’m Calvin, product lead for Meeting Cost Calculator. The team and I are incredibly stoked to share our newest tool all of you. We built Meeting Cost Calculator to help run our business with a data-driven point of view and very quickly discovered that seeing a cost associated with time really helped drive home the importance of good quality meetings. Our initial goal was to give business leaders a clear view into what their business spends to facilitate meetings. Going forward, we plan to continue to provide even more data, as well as features that help improve meeting quality and culture. We’ve introduced support for Google Workspace users and very soon will be introducing Outlook support. We'd love to hear from you. Give it a try and let us know what you think!