Hey folks,

I was in a meeting last week that I didn't need to be in.

8 people in a Google Meet, and if I'm honest, at least half of us were there to "stay in the loop." I caught myself not adding much: nodding along, answering an email on the side, building with Claude and waiting for the one part that actually involved me. And a thought landed.

What is this hour actually costing the company?

Not in a resentful way. Meetings are part of the job, and a lot of them matter. But as a founder you feel the trade off: every hour someone spends in a room is an hour they're not spending on the work. This week I built something small to answer the question in real numbers. Let me show you how to use the new Claude Artifacts to build a simple meeting cost tracker.

Let's dive in..

The trap with meetings is the cost is completely invisible in the moment.

A calendar invite is free to send. A room full of people feels like progress. Nobody stands at the door with a meter running.

But the meter is running. Take that meeting I was in. 8 people, an hour, a mix of senior and mid salaries. Do the rough math and you're looking at several hundred dollars for a single sitting.

Make it a weekly, and you've quietly committed tens of thousands of dollars a year to one recurring block on the calendar that nobody ever revisits to ask if it's still worth it.

And I want to be careful here, because this is not a "meetings are evil" rant. They're not. As a founder my whole job is making sure the work moves, everyone's pointed the same way, and we can tell if we're winning. That takes talking to each other.

Alignment is real work, not a distraction from it. Some of the best decisions I've ever made happened in a room with a whiteboard and too much coffee.

The question was never "should we meet." It was "do we know what this one costs, and would we still say yes if we did."

The honest answer, for a chunk of my week, was no. I'd have said no. And I only knew that because I finally saw the figure.

Right up until then, every one of those meetings looked exactly like the valuable ones on the calendar. A block of time with important-sounding names attached. Nothing on the invite tells you which are pulling their weight and which are habits nobody has questioned since someone set them up 18 months ago.

I don't need to sit through an hour to know what happened in it anymore. I can have Claude take the notes or the transcript and hand me back the 3 things that matter: what was decided, what's blocked, and what needs me.

A 3-minute read of a 60-minute meeting.

So now there are two very different kinds of meeting on my calendar. The ones where I'm genuinely needed, where a decision gets made or something gets built in the room. And the ones where I'm just a set of eyes and ears, which a good summary handles better than my divided attention ever did.

Once you can see that split clearly, the cost question gets sharper.

I wanted to actually see the number.

This week Anthropic switched on public sharing for the things Claude builds. Up to now, a tool you made inside a Claude chat basically stayed with you.

As of this week you can publish it as a live link anyone can open, share it inside your company, or in your team plans.

12 months ago, "I want a little tool that shows me what a meeting costs" would have died in my head. I'd have started a spreadsheet, buried the logic in cells nobody else would open, and abandoned it by Thursday. I've got a graveyard of half-built spreadsheets exactly like it.

So I asked Claude to build it. People, hourly rate, length. Show me the cost climbing as I type, and what it adds up to over a year if the meeting is weekly. 1 prompt.

The build took about 2 minutes. The tool is not really the point of this story, though. The number is.

I didn't cancel every meeting. That's not the lesson, and it would be a dumb one.

What changed is smaller and more useful. The number gave us a shared piece of language. "Do we all need to be here" used to feel like a rude question. Now it's just a reasonable one, because there's a figure attached to the answer.

A couple of standing meetings quietly turned into a shared doc plus a 3-minute AI recap for the people who only needed to stay informed. The ones we kept, we kept on purpose.

The cost was always there. I just never made it visible, so it never entered the decision.

Turns out the number was 2 minutes away the whole time.

Pick the one recurring meeting you quietly resent. Before the next occurrence, work out its real cost: heads in the room, rough hourly rate, length, times however often it repeats in a year.

If you want the version I built, open Claude, describe a meeting cost calculator in a sentence or two, and hit Publish so your team can use it too. Give it 2 minutes.

Then take the number into your next planning conversation and watch how fast "do we all need to be here" stops being an awkward question.

👉️ Know a founder who feels this pain? Forward it. When one person subscribes from your link, you unlock the Beyond the Buzz Prompt Vault: 10 copy-paste prompts that do real work. Forward and unlock the Vault.

Cheers, Tim