Ask YC: Auction-based pricing?

You're making this harder than it needs to be. Your tenant market isn't "freelancers," it's "freelancers who can afford $x/month." You just need to decide how much "x" is based on the desirability of the space.

Basing rent on what it costs you to service the place is OK if you just want to keep the space occupied, but not if you intend to make money. So make the decision: which is it? Profit or occupancy?

I was a landlord for a few years and had to deal with this every time a lease expired; it isn't rocket science.

Pricing is very hard to get right especially when you have a conflicting values and aims to balance. Like you we are a larger coworking space and therefor are not just supplementing our office with some additional coworking. We built The Werks http://thewerks.org.uk purely for coworking. We have a capacity of ~70 people so had to balance the aims of;

1. Covering our rent and the large financial risk 2. Creating an environment that brings interesting people into the space, as madmotive implies the people are what makes the space work 3. Being open and flexible to suit people with different incomes, often the most interesting people are not the ones with the largest budget but can contribute more in other ways

What has worked for us is to do some of what tstegart suggests and create different products for different people so we have a percentage of the space as small offices who pay a higher rate plus a number of serviced desks... these create financial stability and provide products that suite those with a better income. We then have all the rest of the space for coworking and offer a range of options that give people choice depending on their need and budget. Some pay £100 per month and less frequent coworkers pay £60. We also have drop-ins with no fixed price. This is important to get right, no fixed price doesn't mean free as free implies no value. It is up to the individual how they pay and it may not be entirely a financial arrangement, we have people do workshops or help out in other ways. If you were to do this, I would encourage you to make it very easy for people to understand value from your perspective so they can make a decision based on facts, most people have no idea what it costs to provide a bit of space so give examples.

There is a delicate balance that we had to work at and still haven't made it perfect, but having such a mixed range of offerings means we are able to balance the financial risk whilst removing barriers to entry for cool people.

What you're actually trying to do is known as price discrimination. In other words, you want people who value the spaces more to pay more. Airlines, for example, do this by charging more if your trip doesn't span a Saturday (since that means it's likely a business trip and business travelers tend to be willing to pay more). Grocery stores do it with coupons (by your willingness to cut out coupons you reveal yourself to be more price sensitive). More generally, companies often do price discrimination by offering two tiers of service (like Windows Professional Edition vs Windows Home Edition, or whatever).

So you'll have to come up with something like that. None of the auction proposals (Dutch, M+1st price, whatever) will do it because everyone will pretend to be poor.

PS: Student/senior discounts are another classic form of price discrimination (the assumption being that students and seniors tend to be more price sensitive).