Meeting Cost Calculator — Real-Time Yuan-Per-Minute Burned, By Salary and Team Size

Real-world use cases

• Kill a recurring weekly sync that nobody defends

  You suspect the 5-person Monday standup is dead weight. Plug in 5 attendees at Tier-1 salaries, set 30 minutes, hit Start burning. The number lands near ¥700 per session, roughly ¥36,000 a year. You drop that figure into the team channel with one question: what decision did last week's sync change? Silence is your answer, and the meeting becomes an async thread by Friday.

• Justify saying no to a 12-person planning marathon

  A director wants every squad lead in a 2-hour quarterly planning call. Load the preset: 12 people, 2 hours, mixed roles. The tool spits out roughly ¥6,000 burned in one sitting. Now you can counter-propose a 4-person core group plus a shared doc for the rest, and you have the exact yuan figure to show why the original invite list costs more than the decision is worth.

• Set a hard cap before a project kickoff

  Before an 8-person kickoff you set 90 minutes and watch the projected cost climb past ¥3,000. You tell the room up front: at minute 60 we stop and anything unresolved moves to a follow-up. The live timer runs on the shared screen during the meeting. People talk tighter when the ¥ figure ticks up in their peripheral vision, and you reclaim the last half hour for actual work.

• Sanity-check a 1-on-1 cadence across a team of 15

  You run weekly 30-minute 1-on-1s with 15 reports. Set 2 people, 30 minutes, your salary tier plus theirs, then multiply by 15 in your head: the calculator shows roughly ¥250 per session, so the cadence costs about ¥3,750 a week of combined time. That is fine for 15 people who need it, but it tells you a bi-weekly rhythm for steady performers frees up real budget without anyone feeling dropped.

Common pitfalls

• Counting only gross salary and skipping the multiplier — a ¥30K/month engineer actually costs the company about ¥42K once you add the 1.4x for insurance, fund and seat, so leaving it at 1.0 understates the meeting by a third.

• Using the mean salary instead of the median — one ¥500K/yr unicorn hire drags a 5-person average way above what your typical attendee earns, which is exactly why the built-in table ships medians, not means.

• Forgetting prep and follow-up time — the live timer only counts the call itself, but a 1-hour meeting that needs 20 minutes of prep per person is really costing you closer to the next bracket up.

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