About two months ago, the Swapit team moved office because our old one was way too big for us. So there is a lot of talk about co-working spaces in Hong Kong. Especially the government and related bodies like to talk about the number of co-working spaces available in Hong Kong – almost like it would be a measure for how dynamic a startup system is. And I guess, to some superficial extend, that might be the case.
We’ve looked at all the co-working places we could find. In fact, there is a really great list from the Jumpstart Magazine that we used as starting point for our research. It’s called: Complete List of Coworking Spaces in Hong Kong
While that list is very cool to have and it has most of the information one would need, it is a bit tedious to click through all the co-working places and be able to decide which one is the most cost effective. There various charging models all those places use. There are hot desks, dedicated desks, rooms, charged per month or day, in a combo for more people, and so on. It’s very easy to find a single desk. But to find a place for multiple people that is cost effective, is not that easy. So let’s look at the following requirements I used for comparison sake:
- Number of seats: 6
- Hot or not: dedicated desks (i.e. not hot)
- Rooms: preferably 1-2 rooms (got to store some paper files and hardware)
Those are really simple, easy to come by with, requirements and I needed to compare actual final prices for those. So for us the winner would have been:
- Ooosh in Lai Chi Kok: $9,000 / month
- Misso Link in Kun Tong: $12,000 / month
- The Good Lab in Cheung Sha Wan: $12,600 / month
The 2 most expensive coworking places for us would have been:
- Garage Society in Central: $43,200 / month
- Wynd in Central: $37,200 / month
- The Hive in Wan Chai: $36,000 / month
There is obviously a very huge difference in pricing! Here is the full list of our own comparison:
You can download the full document here:
- Coworking Places Overview PDF
- Coworking Places Overview ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet)
in case you’d like edit / extend our overview yourself
To Co-Work or Not To Co-Work
So in the end, we decided to move within our existing office building, just to a smaller unit a couple of floors down. Hence, we’ve decided not to go to a co-working space. If you’re building a business a growing team and do some seriously creative, innovative and disruptive work, we figured it is more important to us to ensure we have a quiet office, without much traffic, with private space where we can leave all of our hardware around and which we can re-arrange as we wish at any time.
As you can see, we can even place our great Swapit T-Shirts prominently there. That’s definitely worth getting your own office for!
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