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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

So is this about sales or about the vibe of having a coffee place where people hang out and chat? I'd be happy to pay some money to work for longer than one drink at a cafe, but I don't really want to drink 5 coffees to work for a day.

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In France we have this small chain of "Anticafes". They're basically coffee shops but instead of paying what you drink, you pay for the time you spend there (5€/hr. or 20€/day) and you can order beverages at will. It's not a coworking space, even though there are plenty of people working, others are chatting or just enjoying their drinks.

Neat, I'd never heard of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-caf%C3%A9

See Workshop Cafe[0], $2/hr for fast wifi, order-by-text table service, suitable spaces for groups, and even some external monitors lying around (as of 2016...)

[0]: http://www.workshopcafe.com

$2 per hour sound like a honest and fair price.

Oh wow, that's awesome! If they had a location near Caltrain, anywhere from Redwood City down to San Jose, I'd start going there once every week or so.

that looks amazing.

This is called a coworking space ;)

Local coworking haunt (UK) is about £20 per day or more. That equates to about 10 coffees. Or 6 coffees, 1 soup and 1 cake. Which starts to make the cafe more appealing.

Sure, for one day this makes no sense. The problem is the pricing there, maybe there are better more sensible priced coworking spaces?

I know coworking spaces (Betahause in Berlin comes into my mind) which combine a "cyber"-cafe with an optional regular coworking space which gives you flexibility for showing up only 1 day and buy a coffee for working some hours.

I don't think £20 a day is so bad really but my experience of co-working spaces is they are often just cafes without the coffee, so not worth paying for.

When I lived in Spain I managed to find an office for 150 euro a month (all inclusive), which was ideal. Now back in the UK I'd likely pay that a week for anything comparable.

Outside of London there is a dire shortage of accessible and affordable work spaces.

If a cafe is making 20 pounds a day per table before VAT, rent and any other expense/tax, they will be out of business.

Agree. We ran a cafe (in the UK South-East) (or rather me being the kitchen hand...), started out enthusiastically with the aim to please and make and serve nice food and drink, then the realisation kicked in that selling beer and quicker table turnaround was more profitable. We still sank. (Small premises mind.)

It makes the cafe more appealing because you're abusing it.

This feels rather personal. I'm not saying I would or would not. I'm just doing a simple comparison. For many, they probably think they are doing the cafe a favour, and getting a change of scenery and a slice of cake.

See if there's a makerspace around. The one I go to has free coffee, and as a bonus, I have access to an entire workshop worth of tools, good for almost any project I could imagine.

A lot of cafes have good local juices, small snacks, or mineral water.

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