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/ ).