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Comment by incomplete | Hacker News Reader

actually, i beg to differ. my wife has a 90% remote job and has a desk @ wework in berkeley. i've met a ton of her weworkmates and while a large percentage are entrepreneurs, many are remote workers or self-employed.

even the small amount of infrastructure that wework provides to it's members is incredibly useful: wifi that always works, coffee, lounge area, meeting/phone rooms and generally a quiet place to focus and get work done.

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I agree. I wonder if most people in this thread saying that renting your own space is cheaper has ever really done this. I have, a bunch, and keeping the lights on is not free in terms of time/money. At a small company, this means either you hire someone to handle all this stuff, or make the employees do it. Either way, running an office yourself ends up being expensive.

I pay $400/month for an office for four. Probably another 100-200/month for random services like Internet access via an ISP, general commercial liability insurance I'm required to carry by my landlord, and other random stuff like, idk, paper.

You absolutely can get a much cheaper office than WeWork. Maybe not if you focus is MEGA GROWTH and you're going to hire 100 people in the 5 days it takes to get a basic network setup going (calendar time, not wall clock - ISPs take time). But that's not the game I'm playing, been there done that, and the place I worked just got bought for about 1/5th of the capital it raised, so I'm kinda over it.

yeah, I guess my point is that maintaining internet and general office stuff is not "free", in that it's costing you your time or money. I don't spend much time on office stuff, but if the office is just software engineers, it's actually pretty expensive for anyone to spend any time on office stuff.

I am not saying it's more expensive than wework, but it is damn sure more expensive than just looking at rent + monthly bills.

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