How to play The Cost Is Right
Each round deals you a meeting that exists somewhere right now: who is in the room, what those people cost per hour, and how long the invite runs. A quick sync that turned out to have a deck. An all-hands with 186 attendees. A budget review, round three, where five department heads spend two hours on a line item smaller than the cost of the argument. You type a price. Then the number appears.
Land within ten percent and the round is perfect — a hundred points. Miss by more and the score slides down a straight line until you are off by more than the meeting is worth, at which point you get nothing and a comment about it. Five rounds per run, five hundred points available, and a streak counter that ticks up while you keep landing close. Finish and you get a title, from Budget Whisperer down to Finance Would Like A Word. Your best run is stored on your device. Beat it.
Where the numbers come from
Every scenario is priced the same way the calculator prices yours: headcount × hourly cost × duration, multiplied by 1.35 for the fully-loaded cost of employing a human — benefits, payroll tax, the desk, the laptop, the eleven SaaS seats, the office plant nobody waters. That multiplier is why almost everybody guesses low on their first run. You are pricing salaries. You should be pricing employment.
The second reason people guess low is that headcount is multiplicative and brains are not. Doubling a meeting from six people to twelve does not make it feel twice as expensive; it feels like a slightly fuller grid of faces. It is exactly twice as expensive. A one-hour meeting with twelve stakeholders at a hundred an hour is a mid-range laptop, purchased and then immediately thrown away, every single week, because nobody remembers who created the invite and nobody feels senior enough to cancel it.
The calculator, for real use
Switch to the second tab and you get the original tool: sliders for people, average hourly cost and length, an overhead toggle, and a live meter you can start when the meeting starts and screenshot when it overruns. It is genuinely useful in two situations — deciding whether a recurring invite earns its slot, and quoting a number in the thread where someone proposes a weekly alignment call. Numbers move meetings that opinions do not. Nobody has ever been persuaded by “this feels like a lot of meetings”. People are absolutely persuaded by a total with a currency symbol in front of it.
Nothing leaves your browser. No account, no upload, no spreadsheet emailed to finance — although if you do send finance a screenshot, please do it in an email. That is rather the point of the site.