Companies carefully evaluate whether to pay $13 or $22 per month for Zoom licenses. Meanwhile, they spend 100-500× that amount on the salary cost of the people sitting in those Zoom calls — without a second thought. The software is a rounding error. The human time is where the real money goes.
Software Cost vs. People Cost
A Zoom Pro license costs roughly $13/month per user. For a 50-person company, that's $7,800/year. Now consider the meeting time: if the average employee spends 12 hours per week on Zoom calls at a fully loaded cost of $50/hour, that's $600/week per person, or $1.44 million per year across the company. The Zoom license is 0.5% of the actual meeting cost.
This isn't a criticism of Zoom — it's a useful tool. But it illustrates how companies obsess over software costs while ignoring the dramatically larger cost of how those tools are used. Saving $5,000 by downgrading a Zoom plan while wasting $200,000 on unnecessary meetings is optimizing the wrong variable.
Remote Meetings Are Easier to Schedule (and That's a Problem)
Before remote work, scheduling a meeting had natural friction: booking a conference room, finding a time when everyone could physically be in the same place, walking between buildings. Remote tools removed all of that friction. Now scheduling a meeting is as easy as clicking "New Meeting" and selecting time slots.
Research on remote and hybrid work patterns has found that the number of meetings per person increased significantly after the shift to remote work. Meetings got shorter on average, but their frequency more than compensated. The net result: people spend as much or more time in meetings than before, spread across a larger number of shorter calls.
Zoom Fatigue Has a Dollar Value
"Zoom fatigue" isn't just a feeling — research from Stanford and other institutions has documented the cognitive toll of video calls. The constant self-view, the reduced nonverbal cues, the processing overhead of multiple faces on a grid — all of it adds cognitive load that doesn't exist in person or on a phone call.
This fatigue translates to reduced productivity after video meetings compared to after in-person meetings or phone calls. If video meetings increase the effective context-switching recovery time by even 5 minutes per meeting, that's a meaningful cost across an organization. For a 50-person company with 200 meetings per week, an extra 5 minutes of recovery per meeting is 867 additional hours per year of reduced productivity.
Practical Fixes
Default to cameras off for status updates and routine syncs. Camera-on is valuable for relationship building and sensitive discussions, but it's unnecessary for reviewing a dashboard or hearing a project update. Camera-off meetings report less fatigue.
Use phone calls for 1-on-1s. A walking phone call is less fatiguing, allows physical movement, and works just as well for most conversations that don't require screen sharing.
Replace recurring video meetings with async video. Tools like Loom let someone record a 5-minute update that the team watches at their own pace. It replaces a 30-minute synchronous meeting with 5 minutes of asynchronous consumption — and people retain more information because they can pause and replay.
Start by calculating what your Zoom meetings actually cost in salary time using our meeting cost calculator. Compare it to your Zoom subscription. The ratio will make it very clear where to focus your optimization efforts.