The meeting that cost us $171… and the product that came out of it.

A few weeks ago, my team had one of those “quick alignment calls.”
Six people.
Forty‑five minutes.
Half the team multitasking.
And we ended it with the classic:
“Cool, let’s sync again tomorrow.”
After the call, I did something out of curiosity.
I calculated the real cost of that meeting.
Annual salaries → hourly rate → meeting duration.
And the number hit hard:

👉 That "quick" meeting cost us $171.
Not a strategy session.
Not a workshop.
Just a random Tuesday alignment call.
I couldn't unsee it.
Then I calculated more meetings:

Weekly standup: $96
Sprint retro: $143
A product "discussion" that dragged to 68 mins: $262

Suddenly, our "mysterious burn rate" wasn’t mysterious at all.
We weren't wasting time.
We were wasting money silently.
That moment pushed me to build something tiny.
Something that later turned into a full‑blown product:

👉 MeetingBurn — a real‑time meeting cost tracker
https://meetingburn.in
It started as a simple calculator…
and now it includes:

live dollar‑based meeting cost meter
team salary profiles
meeting logs & analytics
weekly/monthly burn insights
shareable reports for Slack/Notion
and more coming soon

The funniest part?
Most founders I showed it to had the same reaction:
"WAIT… our weekly meeting costs that much?!"
So now I’m genuinely curious what the Indie Hackers crowd thinks:
💬 If you saw the dollar cost ticking up during your meetings…
Would it change anything?
💬 Have you ever calculated the cost of your team’s meetings before?
Did the number surprise you?
💬 Do you see this as a real problem, or just a founder obsession?
(Be brutally honest , I genuinely want to know.)
This entire project started from one uncomfortable $171 realization.
Curious what number you might discover.