I'll echo @jot, we're another UK team (Round 2, been here 8 weeks). The pricing is similar to Brighton back home (smaller than London on the south coast), we get a 2 bed very nice apartment for £850UKP equivalent (though we pay a £100 excess each for that, no pool here sadly either), our bills for cooker-gas/electric/internet are another £100/mo on top. We could have chosen more central, smaller and cheaper but we chose a nice/larger place. The Metro is roughly £1 per journey (bus/metro/both). Cell SIM is £20/month for HSDPA with a reasonable data limit. Food is similar to back home (lunch costs £10, evening meal £10-£30, supermarkets the same as home).

Basically we get to live in a city for the cost of a small UK city which, for us, is quite a nice deal. Nobody else has complained about the amount of money (which comes for 0% equity), the problems are more around the govt. bureaucracy and the refund process which saps time. We jut got almost 100% of our requests first month reimbursements back at a time-cost of 1.5 days.

At the end of the day we've got $20k USD to invest in people and $20k to live off here. Fine for MVP->launch (we're 3 weeks from alpha launch with http://strongsteam.com/ ).

Accommodation costs are low, housing allowance is enough to live in a modern apartment (often with a pool) for 6 months.

Food costs are similar to Europe / US. If you do eat cheaply you'll have more personal cash to spend on other things / save to stretch out your stay.

We at @agentpiggy went from no product to version 1 for soft beta launch with that money, living comfortable enough and eating salad and chicken.

decurate.com. If you're a 2 person team with development skills, the $40k will easily cover living expenses and product launch. You're capped at a salary of $750 each + $1200 for rent total (these were the limits for two members when we were there). We developed the site in 10 weeks and had a significant amount of money to invest in customer acquisition.