Setting Up Your First Office on a Budget
Six desks, chairs that will not wreck anyone’s back, and internet that holds a call. Roughly ₹2.4 lakh if you buy it, ₹0 if you do not, and the case for each.
Every founder setting up a first office asks the same question in the wrong order. They ask what to buy. The question is whether to buy anything at all.
The buy-nothing option
Six seats in a coworking space at the ₹8,499 median is ₹50,994 a month. Furniture, internet, electricity, housekeeping, tea, a meeting room: all of it comes in that number. You pay a month or two as deposit and you start on Monday.
Now the other route.
What it costs to kit out six desks yourself
| Item | Sensible spend | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 6 desks | ₹36,000 | ₹6,000 each. Do not buy fancy. Buy flat. |
| 6 chairs | ₹54,000 | ₹9,000 each, and this is the one line not to cheap out on |
| Internet, two lines | ₹6,000 | Monthly. One line is not two lines. |
| Router, switch, cabling | ₹15,000 | One time |
| Air conditioning | ₹80,000 | Two units, installed, if the space is bare |
| Power backup | ₹35,000 | Inverter for lights, fans and laptops |
| Fridge, kettle, microwave | ₹25,000 | |
| Whiteboard, storage, bits | ₹15,000 | The bits always cost more than you think |
| One time total | ₹2,60,000 | Before rent and deposit |
Then add rent, a deposit of six to ten months, electricity, housekeeping, and someone whose job becomes chasing the landlord about the water tank.
Where to actually save
Buy used desks, never used chairs. Office furniture resale in every major city is full of perfectly good desks from companies that shut down. A desk is a flat surface. A chair is eight hours of your back.
Skip the branding. The wall decal, the neon sign, the reception logo. It costs ₹40,000 and no customer has ever bought because of it.
Do not build a meeting room yet. Book one by the hour. The median is ₹1,800 and you will use it four times a month. That is ₹7,200 against ₹1.5 lakh of glass partitioning.
Two internet lines from different providers. This is the one place to spend more, not less. A day offline for six people costs more than the year of the second connection.
- No brokerage
- Free visits
- We negotiate
When buying is right
Three situations, and they are narrower than founders think.
You are building something physical and need the bench. You are handling data that needs a controlled room. Or you are past thirty people, where the per seat economics finally tip and a fit out pays back inside two years.
If none of those is true, the ₹2.6 lakh buys you about five months of an engineer instead.
The thing nobody warns you about
Setting up an office is a project, and the project manager is you. Quotes, deliveries that arrive broken, an electrician who does not turn up, a landlord who says the air conditioning was always like that. Reckon on six to eight weeks and a surprising number of your own hours.
That is the real cost of the cheap option, and it does not appear on any spreadsheet.
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