Meeting cost ticker for Google Calendar

B2BChrome extensionweekendChrome ExtensionVanilla JS

The idea

Everyone jokes that “this meeting could have been an email,” but nobody sees the number. Put “$3,400” on a weekly status meeting and it becomes a screenshot that gets posted to Slack and Twitter — the distribution is built into the product. Harvard Business Review has covered exactly this concept; no dominant tool exists.

Who pays

The extension itself is free (that’s the growth engine). Monetize with a team version later: org-wide meeting-cost dashboards for ops leaders, priced per seat. Or simply grow the install base and let it be the audience for your next product.

MVP scope

  • Cost badge on the event popup
  • Configurable hourly rate + currency
  • Weekly total in the extension popup
  • Skip for v1: per-person salary data, Outlook support, team dashboards
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build a Chrome extension called MeetingMeter that displays the estimated
cost of meetings inside Google Calendar.

Behavior: on calendar.google.com, when the user opens an event that has
guests, inject a small badge into the event detail popup showing the
estimated cost, e.g. "~$1,240 · 8 people · 1h". Cost = number of attendees
x duration x an assumed blended hourly rate. Default rate $75/hour,
configurable in the extension popup, with optional per-domain overrides
(e.g. externals at $0 so they don't count).

Also add a running weekly total in the extension popup: "Your meetings
this week: ~$6,800" computed from the visible calendar week.

Implementation: Manifest V3, a content script that watches for Google
Calendar's event-detail DOM via MutationObserver (Google's class names are
obfuscated, so locate the popup by aria attributes and structure, not
class names), chrome.storage.sync for settings. No external servers, no
analytics, no permissions beyond calendar.google.com — privacy is the
selling point. Include a live-updating "this meeting has cost $X so far"
ticker when the current time is inside the event window.

Make the badge design minimal and native-feeling. Include a settings
popup with rate, currency, and an on/off toggle.

// More B2B ideas