Texas CoworkingKnowledge base

Coworking, coffee shop, home office or a lease - which?

An honest comparison, including the cases where coworking is the wrong answer.

Coworking is sold as the answer to everything. It is not, and a directory that pretended otherwise would not be much use.

Work from home when

Your work is deep and solitary, your home has a door that closes, and you have a social life that does not depend on work. Home is free, and free is hard to beat. The failure mode is isolation, and it arrives slowly enough that people often do not notice until it has cost them something.

Coffee shops when

You need two or three hours out of the house, not a working day. They fail on calls, on power sockets, on any second screen, on anything confidential, and on the simple matter of leaving your laptop to visit the lavatory.

Coworking when

You need reliable internet, somewhere to take a call, an address that is not your house, and other people in the room. It is also the only one of these four that scales gracefully: one desk becomes three without a negotiation.

Your own lease when

You have a team of roughly eight or more, you need the space configured your way, or your work needs a room nobody else can enter. Below that headcount the arithmetic rarely favours a lease once you count fit-out, furniture, internet, cleaning, insurance and the months you pay for space you have not grown into yet.

The honest version. For a solo worker with a quiet house and no client meetings, coworking is a want rather than a need. That is a perfectly good reason to buy it - just buy it knowingly, and buy a day pass first.

Terms on this page

Fit-out
The cost of making a bare leased space usable - walls, flooring, wiring, furniture.
Flex space
Umbrella term for coworking, serviced offices and any short-commitment workspace.

← All knowledge base entries