Coworking vs Work From Home: A Cost Comparison for a 5 Person Team

"We work from home, so our office cost is zero." We hear this a lot, and it is almost never true. The costs move rather than disappear, and some of them move somewhere you cannot see them.

Below, the same five person team costed three ways. Adjust the numbers to your own situation, but keep all the lines.

Model 1: fully remote

Line item	Monthly
Internet allowance, ₹1,000 a person	₹5,000
Electricity top up, ₹800 a person	₹4,000
Meeting rooms for client calls and interviews, 4 hours	₹7,200
Quarterly team day, spread monthly	₹5,000
Recurring total	₹21,200
Desk and chair, one time, ₹25,000 a person	₹1,25,000

Meeting rooms are the line most people forget. In Bengaluru the median hourly rate is ₹1,800, and four hours a month is conservative once you are interviewing or seeing customers.

Model 2: hybrid, roughly two days a week in

Line item	Monthly
Day passes, 8 days each at ₹400	₹16,000
Internet and electricity allowance, halved	₹4,500
Meeting rooms, mostly covered by the pass	₹0 to ₹2,000
Total	₹20,500 to ₹22,500

Look at that carefully. Two days a week in a proper workspace costs about the same as staying fully remote, because the pass absorbs the meeting rooms and half the allowances.

Model 3: five dedicated desks

Line item	Monthly
5 seats at the ₹8,500 median	₹42,500
Internet, electricity, housekeeping, tea	Included
Meeting room credits	Usually included, then hourly
Home allowances	Not needed
Total	₹42,500

Deposit is one to two months, lock in three to six. Nothing to buy, nothing to maintain.

So the real gap is ₹20,000 a month

For five people, full coworking costs about ₹21,000 a month more than working from home. That is ₹4,200 per person, and if you are GST registered you claim the 18% back, so call it ₹3,500 net.

The question is not whether ₹21,000 is a lot of money. It is whether an office buys you ₹21,000 of something.

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Where remote genuinely wins

Deep, solo work. Writers, designers and engineers on long problems often do their best work at home, and no open plan floor beats a quiet room.
Hiring reach. You can hire the right person in Indore instead of the available person in your pincode.
Commute time returned. Ninety minutes a day back is a real quality of life improvement, and people notice when you take it away.
Cash. ₹21,000 a month is ₹2.5 lakh a year. At pre revenue, that is worth protecting.

Where it quietly costs you

Junior people learn slowly. Someone with two years of experience picks things up by overhearing. Remotely, they wait for a scheduled call and stay stuck for a day.
Onboarding drags. A new joiner takes noticeably longer to become useful when nobody is sitting beside them.
Home is not always workable. Shared flats, family at home, poor power backup, a broadband line that dies in the rain. Not everyone has a spare room, and few will tell you that in an interview.
Client meetings look improvised. Booking a room by the hour for every visit gets old fast.
You lose the address. Registering the company at a founder's flat is fine until GST verification or a customer looks you up.

What we would do with a five person team

Hybrid, honestly. Two or three fixed days together, day passes or a small cabin for those days, and the rest at home. It costs about the same as fully remote once you count everything, and it fixes the two problems remote actually has, which are onboarding and the sense of being one company.

Set the days, do not leave it to preference. "Tuesdays and Thursdays, everyone" works. "Come in when you feel like it" means four people in an empty room on different days.

Start with day passes for a month, count the usage, and convert to dedicated desks if people are showing up more than twelve days each.