Do you know what your meetings cost?

Here's the number that made the rounds: when Shopify built a meeting cost calculator into its calendar, a routine three-person, thirty-minute meeting came out at $700 to $1,600. Not a workshop. A standard half-hour sync. Shopify looked at the aggregate and had IT delete every recurring meeting with more than two people, freeing over 76,500 hours in a single move.

Sources: Shopify via CNN & Fortune (2023); Flowtrace industry aggregate (2026).

The formula (simpler than you'd guess)

You don't need Shopify's tooling to do this. The math fits on a napkin:

meeting cost ≈ attendees × length (hours) × average hourly cost per person

Hourly cost is just annual total compensation ÷ ~2,080 working hours. Six people on an average €80k package, in a one-hour meeting, costs about €230 — once. Make it weekly and you've committed roughly €12,000 a year to that one recurring block.

Try it on a typical week

Drop in your own numbers. This runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.

Your inputs stay in your browser. The annualised figure is the cost of the company time you spend in meetings across a year.

The sticker price is the cheap part

The salary number is the easy cost to see. The expensive ones don't show up on any invoice:

• Lost focus. The average knowledge worker toggles between apps nearly 1,200 times a day and burns close to four hours a week just reorienting. Meetings are the biggest scheduled interruption there is.
• The recovery tax. Research on "meeting recovery syndrome" finds that four hours of meetings can need two to three hours of recovery before deep work resumes. A meeting rarely costs only its own length (more on that in why you're always exhausted).
• Opportunity cost. The most expensive person in the room is also the one whose hour was worth the most elsewhere.
• The meetings about meetings. The pre-brief, the recap, the "let's take this offline." All real, all uncosted.

A €230 meeting isn't a €230 problem. Held weekly, it's a €12,000-a-year line item nobody approved.

Flow is the thing you're actually buying back

The reason meeting cost matters isn't guilt — it's flow. Deep, valuable work needs uninterrupted runway; most research puts the floor at around 90 minutes to reach a flow state. A calendar diced into 30-minute gaps between meetings never clears that bar, no matter how disciplined you are. Cutting meeting cost is really about buying back contiguous focus time.

A lot of meeting cost is also just the wrong tool for the job. Two patterns have quietly absorbed huge amounts of meeting time at async-first companies:

• A knowledge base instead of a status meeting. Notion, a wiki, a shared doc — written updates people read on their own time. Most "alignment" meetings are a knowledge-base problem in disguise.
• A coordination channel instead of a sync. Slack or Teams for the quick back-and-forth that didn't need thirty minutes and six calendars.
• AI for the summary. Notes, recaps, and action items that used to justify a meeting's existence are increasingly a transcript-and-summarise job, not a "get everyone in a room" one.

None of these kill good meetings. They free those meetings up to be the decisions and conversations that genuinely need to happen live.

What a calculator can't tell you

The widget above prices a hypothetical meeting. It can't see that you personally sat in 31 hours of meetings last week, or which recurring one nobody ever skips. That's the gap Meetwrap fills: it reads your actual work calendar and shows your real number — hours, recurring load, the cost, and the specific meetings worth questioning.

It's free, takes about thirty seconds, and it's read-only — your calendar is read in your browser to build the wrap, and titles never reach a server.

Curious how your load compares to others in your role and country? See the meeting benchmarks.