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I would personally suggest Cape Town, South Africa, if you're a bit adventurous. Lovely weather, good people, cheap, excellent food. It's a bit out of the way (10h flying to Europe, more to US), but same timezone as Europe. English is the main language. Moved here 8 years ago and no regrets
Just off top of my head...Vancouver, Seattle, Austin, Denver, Toronto, and Waterloo. Cheaper than the Bay Area and still with an intellectually high community.
So the good news is that after SV/SF, everything is cheap! Well, mostly.... I would personally suggest Cape Town, South Africa, if you're a bit adventurous. Lovely weather, good people, cheap, excellent food. It's a bit out of the way (10h flying to Europe, more to US), but same timezone as Europe. English is the main language. Moved here 8 years ago and no regrets
If you're single, just cut your expenses and stay in the Bay Area. Get rid of your car, get roommates, stop eating out. It's much easier to cut your spending than move, and you will definitely be giving up opportunity and intellectual community no matter where in the world you move compared to SF. Also, Berlin fits your criteria. If you just want somewhere cheap try Thailand. Many coworking spaces, but harder to find…
1) Define "cheap". You're in the Bay Area, which is by every definition the opposite of "cheap", but substituting that with something like Seattle or Austin or Brooklyn doesn't sound like it's accomplishing what you're looking for to me, even though it's absolutely cheaper. You said you want to focus on your own intellectual pursuits, so are you planning to quit your job and just try to pick up freelance gigs here and there to pay bills or live off your savings or what?
2) Related to #1... if you plan on quitting your job and just freelancing it or living off your savings, you're going to run into visa issues if you move abroad. If you're planning on finding a job somewhere else that heavily impacts the situation - it needs to be a tech center that offers other options that will sponsor you. What's the intention here?
3) What non-work features/perks/requirements/options are you concerned about? Middle of nowhere Kansas is one of the cheapest places you could possibly find in the US, but it's absolutely not for everyone and won't work out if you like having new restaurants opening every week, going to museums, and the other little things a big city provides to add variety to life.
4) Living in the Bay Area means you're used to cool and rainy but still mild weather year-round. Do you think you could deal with snow and wind with temperatures well into the negative? If not winters in Northern Europe (and, realistically, a lot of the rest of Europe) are going to be a problem. Not a fan of humid and stagnant with no air conditioning? That's going to mean the Caribbean, Central/South America, and parts of the Pacific aren't going to be an option - it's not standard there because of the power requirements. If you end up somewhere with a drastically different climate that can completely destroy your motivation and mood, which could be a deal breaker.
If you feel adventurous you can consider moving to Poland. I would recommend Krakow. Most young people will speak English, there are couple of top Universities there (PK and AGH for technical schools, UJ for humanities, medicine and some tech too and UE for economics). The tech scene seems to be constantly growing, with lots of international companies having their offices there. As a senior dev in Poland you can earn…
Healthcare starts at ~$130/mo if you manage to not pay for the retirement fund scam (rarely possible), goes up to like $350/mo if you run your own company (not 100% sure, I can thankfully avoid it). The income tax is 19%.
I lived a year in Vilnius and after the usual struggle to get connected found the startup community there quite thriving. Still, most of my friends where expats. You can live comfortably on 1300 EUR/month. (Average salary is 1000 EUR, but probably a bit higher in Vilnius). To evaluate visit first in winter because it’s the worst time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not local, but I try and keep up from time to time, and I have seen a lot of hand-wringing on the Internet about how low Berlin tech wages are.
Depends where you're comparing them to in the US but in general most European tech wages are lower than the US. If comparing to SF perhaps even shockingly lower. It can be hard to swallow at first, but when you account for lower rent, much cheaper health insurance, and far more vacation days (~20-24 by law - and no one actually expects you to be available) along with safer cities with generally higher quality of life…