I'm an eng manager and tech lead. I have too many meetings. Instead of cancelling any of them like a normal person, I spent a weekend building a tool that shows what they cost in real-time. Classic engineer move.

It's Ash Flow (https://ashflow.app). You add people to a meeting by job title and country, and it pulls salaries from a database I built with 80+ roles across 30+ countries. Hit start and you get a live counter ticking up showing exactly how much money is being burned.

The whole point is the shareable URL. You drop it in the Zoom or MS teams chat or pull it up on the conference room TV. Sharing the link or your screen and showing this on the side. suddenly people starting getting to the point faster, or try to reduce meetings. Thats the idea at least. So far for me, its reduced number of meetings and wasted/dead meeting time.

Tech: Basically TanStack Start and Turso for the DB for the salary data. The shared/read-only view strips out individual salary numbers so you're not accidentally doxxing what people make or who they are. no names, just job titles.. Currency detection is automatic from browser locale, conversions come from ECB exhange rates.

The salary database was honestly the hardest part. Getting reasonable numbers for a Senior Software Engineer in Germany vs India vs Brazil, across 80+ titles, is a lot of spreadsheet work. I'm sure some of it is off, which is part of why I'm posting here.

if you have opinions about TanStack Start, I spent some time with this building various types of projects with it and have thoughts.

https://ashflow.app