Put a price on the work nobody invoices

What Cost Of is

Every company runs on costs that no invoice ever shows. Nobody signs off on the standup. Nobody approves the six interruptions a day. The bill still arrives — it is just paid in salary, quietly, twelve months a year.

Cost Of asks for a handful of inputs — how many people, how long, how often, roughly what they earn — and gives back one number with the arithmetic shown line by line. Five calculators cover the costs that come up most often in real budget arguments, and each one prints the same kind of receipt.

There is no account, no signup and no backend. Everything is computed in your browser, and every input is encoded in the page URL, so sharing a result is just sharing a link: whoever opens it sees your numbers on their own screen and can immediately change them.

Why one number changes the conversation

Arguing about meetings in the abstract goes nowhere, because both sides are right in the abstract. A weekly one-hour meeting with ten people is not "an hour" — it is 480 people-hours a year, a quarter of a full-time role, spent on one recurring calendar entry. That is a fact you can put on a slide.

The receipt matters as much as the total. Every line is visible: the hourly cost, the number of occurrences, the overhead. So the person you send it to can argue with an assumption instead of with you — and the discussion moves from "meetings are bad" to "do all eight people need to be there, and does it need to be weekly".

That is also why nothing is hidden behind a paywall or a sign-up form. A cost argument only works if the other side can re-run it themselves.

How the calculators work

Every people cost starts from the same formula: annual gross salary × a fully-loaded multiplier ÷ working hours per year. The multiplier covers what the employer pays on top of gross salary — employer taxes, benefits, equipment, software. The default is 1.3, and both the multiplier and the working year are editable.

Everything is then annualised, so a 30-minute meeting and a monthly subscription can sit on the same receipt. Frequencies become occurrences per year: weekly is 48 by default, every workday is 5 × 48 = 240, monthly is 12.

The result is rendered as a receipt: each input becomes a line, the lines add up to a total, and a plain-language sentence underneath translates the total into something human — full-time salaries, working days, or money per minute. The coupon at the bottom is the cheapest change you could make.

Nothing about the calculation is a black box. If a number looks wrong, the line that produced it is right there, and the assumption behind it is a field you can edit.

Where the presets come from

Salary presets are median gross annual pay by country and role, in local currency, for 15 countries and 10 roles. They were curated from official statistics (BLS, ONS, Job Bank, CAGED and equivalents) and large salary surveys, then re-checked figure by figure against a second source. They are starting points, not truth about your company: type your own number and the whole receipt follows it.

SaaS prices are public list prices per seat per month on annual billing, taken from the vendors' own pricing pages. Real invoices are usually lower after negotiation and higher after add-ons, so the calculator lets you overwrite every price, seat count and billing unit.

The research constants — about 23 minutes to return to interrupted work, a fully-loaded multiplier around 1.3, 1,920 working hours a year — are cited with their sources on the home page, including where a widely repeated figure turned out to have no traceable origin.

What it deliberately does not do

It is not accounting software. There is no per-country employer-tax model, no VAT, no currency conversion between countries, and no attempt to model opportunity cost, morale or the value of the work the meeting produced. One receipt uses one currency.

It does not collect your inputs. There is no server to send them to; the numbers exist in your browser and in the link you choose to share. Page visits are counted anonymously, without cookies and without any of the values you typed.

And it does not tell you to cancel the meeting. Plenty of expensive meetings are worth every hour. The point is to know the price before you decide.