Paul, I read in a blog where I found the link, that it's $500 a month per person ($200 rent + $300 services), non-negotiable. That blog post was written in 2005, so I didn't want to put the prices down as they may have gone up (or maybe it became negotiable.) What do you think about $500 a month per person to be located in Boston on the red line between Harvard and MIT? And they allow you to scale to 30 people, as well. Some people here have said they wanted to create startup hubs for $400 rent in Silicon Valley, so this seems to be very similarly priced. All offices have windows, and you get unlimited use of meeting space. Maybe one could get part-time help from some Harvard, MIT or any Boston college students since it's right there.
From what I gather, yours is the better program. Although somebody could probably save up 5 or 10 grand and join the CIC for 6 months with a prototype and show it off to different investors there, they probably wouldn't get much of a better deal than you offer.
What I think makes YC better is that you have all software guys, while they have all sorts of startups, and the people they interviewed seem to be in the 40's, which is also a change from the ages of the people who I saw at startup school.
Let's say it's 5k per company plus 5k per founder. Lucrative!
Seriously though, it sounds like a clever profiting model, as you can control the kinds of tenants very well, plus you can claim some credit for any successes.
This is Tim Rowe at CIC. Pricing is in the $500-$1000/person/mo range if spaces are used efficiently (we have 250 different spaces, so these are just guidelines). Availability is the main reason we want you to call in: availability changes hour to hour. One day we will come up with a cool web app to let you take a virtual tour of available spaces.
Thanks for the link. I have been enjoying working in a shared open-space work space in Vancouver http://abetterplacetowork.com and looking for something similar in Cambridge
