Twelve questions worth asking before you sign up for a coworking space
The questions a coworking tour will not answer unless you ask them, with our own answers written next to each one.
Most coworking tours are the same tour. Someone walks you past the good-looking corner, mentions the community, and hands you a brochure. You leave with a feeling rather than an answer, and the things that will actually annoy you in month three never came up.
Here are the questions worth asking. They are the ones we would ask, and we have written our own answers next to them so you can see what a straight one looks like.
About the space
“When is this room open — this specific room?”
Not the building. The room you would be sitting in. Spaces routinely advertise the opening hours of their most permissive area and let you assume it applies everywhere.
Ours: Hall 1 is 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Saturday. Hall 2 runs continuously from Monday 09:00 to Saturday 17:00. The conference room is available 24 hours, every day. Some private offices have round-the-clock access. Sunday the shared halls are closed. All of it is published.
“What does 24/7 mean here?”
Push on this one. Twenty-four hours across a Monday-to-Saturday week is a completely different product from genuine seven-day access, and both get sold with the same three characters.
“What does the power backup actually cover?”
Sockets only, or the air conditioning and the internet too? In a Lahore summer a backed-up laptop in an un-cooled room is not a working environment. Ask what happened during the last long outage — the answer will be specific if it went well and vague if it did not.
“How many people share this internet connection, and is there a second one?”
Nobody publishes a contention ratio, and any number they give you is unverifiable. What you can do is turn up at 3pm on a weekday, connect to the guest wifi and run a speed test yourself. Do that before you sign anything.
About the money
“What is the price per seat?”
For a private office, always divide. An office at PKR 80,000 holding four desks is PKR 20,000 a seat. One at PKR 60,000 holding two is PKR 30,000 a seat and costs you more, despite the smaller headline. Operators quote whichever number flatters them.
“Is the meeting room included, or metered?”
The most common gap between the brochure and the invoice. If it is included, ask how many hours. If it is metered, ask the hourly rate and work out what your actual usage would cost over a year.
Ours: included with every plan, day passes included, bookable by the hour, no cap.
“Is there a deposit, and what is the notice period?”
A monthly rate with three months’ notice is not a monthly rate — it is a quarterly contract described optimistically. Ask both, and ask when a deposit comes back.
“What is not included?”
A better question than “what is included”, because it is harder to answer smoothly. Printing, lockers, after-hours access, parking, tea and coffee — each is small and none of them is small over twelve months.
About whether you will actually use it
“Can I sit here for a day first?”
If the answer is anything other than yes and here is the rate, that tells you something. A day pass is the cheapest due diligence available. Ours is PKR 1,999.
“How loud is it at the busiest time?”
Tours happen at quiet hours, which is not an accident. Ask when the space is fullest and arrange to see it then. A shared hall at capacity is a different room from the one in the photographs.
“Where would I actually sit?”
Not “is there space” but “which seat”. Fixed seats and hot desks are different products: one lets you leave a monitor set up and come back to it, the other means arriving early. We write member names on seats, so the question has a specific answer.
“How far is it really?”
Measure it at the time you would travel, not on a map. Twelve minutes at 11am is a different journey from the same route at 9am. The commute you will actually resent is the peak one.
The one that tells you the most
Ask something the space would rather not answer — what the internet is like when it is full, what the notice period is, what is genuinely not included — and watch whether you get a number or an atmosphere.
Anything a space will not put in writing before you pay, it will not honour after.
That applies to us too. Everything above is on this site: the prices, the hours for every room, the common questions. If we have missed one, ask and we will add it — there are a handful we genuinely do not have good answers for yet, and we would rather write them down than improvise.
Desk&Wifi is on the second floor at 31-C, facing Al-Fatah in Sector C Commercial, Bahria Town, Lahore. Front desk 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Saturday, and no tour script.