I envision this topic as something that can potentially help out a lot of HNers as well.
I think these environments are great!
I work there 2 or 3 times a week, otherwise i work out of my home office the whole day banging out code. But there are times you just need human interaction and meeting rooms. It's slightly embarrassing asking people to meet with you at home. Being at dogpatchlabs is much more professional :)
(Edit: plus the location was slightly dodgy. During my spell 2 shootings and 1 stabbing just yards from the entrance)
Figure out the total dollar cost of coffee at a coffee shop, struggling to connect, traveling between the library and coffee shop or time lost distracted at home. Its most likely a good deal to get your own small space somewhere.
Hacker Dojo is just $100/mo, which is less than spending $5 a day. If your time is worth $50 an hour, you only need to save 6 minutes a day to spend that $100 every month.
If you only make $25/hour and the rent is $200 per person, you just need to get 24 minutes of extra productivity per day. seems like a deal to me
As for the price, it's probably going to cost you much less than getting your own office space -- at least here in LA. CoLoft costs $345/month fulltime and $495/month fulltime with 24/7 access.
Working there was great. There were lots of people there working on all sorts of creative projects. The creative energy was a great motivating factor, and often times there were people that could help you through whatever business or technical problems you were facing (well, technical problems required someone to know what you were working on).