How much do meetings actually cost

I've been doing this calculation for years and it never stops being clarifying.

Take a 90-minute product planning session. Eight people in the room: two engineers, two PMs, a designer, an engineering manager, a VP of Product, and a founder. All in. Loaded salaries including benefits, overhead, equity — call it $250K/year fully loaded average across that group.

At 2,000 working hours per year, that's $125/hour per person. Eight people times $125 times 1.5 hours: $1,500 for the meeting.

That's not including opportunity cost. That's not including the prep time before the meeting or the follow-up time after. That's just the raw loaded hourly cost of the humans in the room.

### What you got for your $1,500

Here's the uncomfortable follow-up question: what did you get out of it?

If the meeting produced three clear decisions, a prioritized list of action items, and a shared understanding of the path forward — that's a good return on $1,500. You'd spend that on a consultant to produce the same clarity.

If the meeting produced a whiteboard full of arrows and sticky notes, a vague sense that "we talked about it," and an action item list that's already fading from everyone's memory as they walk back to their desks — you might have just lit $1,500 on fire.

### The output gap

I call this the output gap: the distance between what happened in the meeting and what actually made it into the work.

Most meetings have a substantial output gap. The discussion happens. Decisions get made. Clarity emerges in the room — genuine, real clarity that everyone can feel. And then people leave and the clarity evaporates.

By the next morning, the action items are vague. By Thursday, half of them have been implicitly abandoned because nobody wrote them down clearly enough to remember who owned them. By the next meeting, the team is re-discussing things it already decided.

The $1,500 bought the experience of clarity. It didn't buy the durable artifact of clarity.

### The whiteboard is the output

The whiteboard in that meeting room has everything. Every decision. Every action item. Every connection between ideas. It's all there in marker.

The problem is that the whiteboard is locked to a physical room, and rooms get booked by other people. The information on the board isn't in a format the work can use — it's not in Notion, not in Linear, not in Jira, not in Slack. It's in marker on a surface you can't take with you.

Boards get photographed. Phones get full. Photos get buried. Transcripts never get written. Action items never get typed. The $1,500 meeting produces a photo that nobody looks at.

### The cost to close the gap

BoardSnap Pro is $9.99/month. A single meeting that produces clean action items — items that actually get followed up on — recovers that cost by orders of magnitude.

I'm not trying to be salesy here. The math is just stark. If you're running $1,500 meetings and losing the output, the cost of the tool that captures the output is noise.

The more important frame: the meeting cost is already sunk. The $1,500 is spent whether or not you capture the output. The question is whether you get the value of the meeting you already paid for.

Snap the board. Ship the action items. Get the value of the meeting you already paid for.