Put A Price On That Meeting Before You Book It
A meeting has a price; it just never appears on an invoice. This multiplies each attendee's loaded hourly cost by the duration, adds them up, and divides by the number of decisions the meeting exists to produce — then annualises it if the meeting recurs. The result is the number that should be in the calendar invite. Local only; nothing leaves the tab.
- Docket
- Attendee rates × duration, per decision and per year
- local
- What it replaces
- 'Let's just get everyone in a room'
- $0.00
- Input
- Attendee rates, duration, and decisions expected
- no card
- Output
- A price, a per-decision cost, and an annual figure
- recomputed
What you pay otherwise
| Route | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| A meeting that could be an email | The whole room's time for one paragraph | the docket |
| Recurring by default | A weekly cost nobody ever re-approved | × 52 |
| Productivity software | Tracking the meeting rather than pricing it | $8/user/mo |
| This page | The price, before you book it | $0 |
The workflow
Use loaded cost, not salary divided by hours
Loaded cost includes employer contributions, benefits, and overhead — commonly 1.3 to 1.5 times the base hourly rate. Using base salary understates the room by a third, which is exactly the margin that makes the argument weak.
Count everyone in the room, including the quiet ones
People who attend 'just to listen' cost the same as those who speak. If someone is there to be informed rather than to decide, that's a note afterwards, not a seat in the room.
Divide by the decisions the meeting exists to make
A 400 meeting that produces one decision costs 400 per decision. A 90 one that produces three costs 30. The per-decision figure is what tells you whether the format is working.
Annualise the recurring ones
A weekly meeting priced at 320 is 16,640 a year. That is the number that changes policy, and it is invisible on any single calendar entry.
Worked example
Sample: 7 attendees, 60 minutes, 2 decisions Total hourly cost 765.00/hr (7 attendees) Meeting cost 765.00 Per attendee 109.29 Per decision 382.50 Weekly, annualised 39,780.00 Uploaded nothing — computed in the tab
Numbers above are sample data produced by the tool's own pre-loaded example, run in the browser — not averages or measured benchmarks.
What breaks this
Using base salary instead of loaded cost understates the room by roughly a third. Leaving out the people who attend to listen hides the largest single saving available. Never annualising a recurring meeting leaves the real number invisible.
Try it now
Seven attendees costing 645 an hour are loaded with two decisions. Remove the three attendees who attend only to listen and watch the cost fall by more than a third.
Open the docket →Go deeper: the printable docket
The docket is free forever. The $4 one-time tier adds:
- Printable docket — the priced meeting on one slip for the invite — estimate: ~6 min saved rebuilding it per meeting.
- Saved meetings shelf — keep up to 12 recurring meetings in this browser — estimate: ~15 min saved auditing a calendar.
- Annual calendar audit — every recurring meeting priced for the year — estimate: ~25 min saved totalling them by hand.