Then stock the place with enough coffee, tea, energy drinks, water, bread, cans of tuna, cans of soup, whatever that's fast and doesn't go bad so you don't have to go out if you're in a good flow. Instant coffee also potentially saves a hell of a lot of money if you're a coffee drinker and on a tight budget.

Edit: Another thought - if you wind up hiring any accountants or lawyers, be really, really cool with them. I remember I hired a lawyer to look at an important contract and I asked his secretary how he took his coffee. That combined with being friendly and gracious went a long way - we originally planned to go about an hour, we went two hours, then he only charged me for one. Very helpful guy, too. Being friendly, courteous, gracious, and doing little gestures makes people want to take care of you. When you don't have money, you have to think even more about being appreciative and putting your time to use for other people.

(Thomas nearly had to smack me silly the other day when I was thinking "Hmm, I think I'll spend some time optimizing my use of Redis so that I still fit in a 1.5GB VPS." I was using 100MB for Redis and it was threatening to push me over the limit... but the next stage is only $ULTIMATELY_SMALL_NUMBER more per month.)

EDIT: Thought I should add something of value to the conversation... That is unless you are prone to spurts of procrastination. For me it's good to have things like this on my to-do list to keep me from doing something completely unproductive when I feel like procrastinating.

The real answer is that not every trade-off will be right for every person. Someone mentioned brewing your own coffee: that's probably smart. I'd get a Chemex and be done with it. Someone else mentioned having multiple people at the same desk. That would make me crazy: if I leave a paper or book or whatever on the desk, I want it exactly where I left. That seems like a false optimization to me.

Another example is office equipment. Getting reasonably good stuff is probably smart -- but buying new probably isn't. A lot of places have office liquidators; in Tucson, there's one named Andersen's that regularly advertises $500 Aerons on Craigslist. If you need a chair or desk, they're probably a good place to go.

This list can go on and on and on... the answer to the OP's question is just too often, "It depends."

* Use Google Voice as your primary number (lets go migrate from Skype to whatever without any headaches down the road)

* OpenDNS (more for the stats than the blocking/filtering capabilities)

* FreshBooks for invoicing and time tracking

* Yammer for inner-company communication (use heavily from start instead of IM/email, huge time saver)

* ZenDesk for customer support, if you're not using it by the end of the trial then ditch it

* Try Salesforce.com when you start pursuing sales, after trial runs up analyze what features you used to see if a free CRM (like vTiger) to see if free will be enough)

* You do not need to go to a Starbucks for every meeting.

* Until you reach profitability your time is not worth much. Apps that save you time are not worth paying for unless you spend that time pursuing profit.

* You do not need an office. Work from home. Work from a co-working space if you must.

* You probably do not need new technology. I still do everything from a 2 year old Dell (big mistake) that is falling apart. Likewise, unless you develop iPhone apps you do not need an iphone 4.

* If you are working from home you don't even need a smartphone. Prepaid is way cheaper. Way cheaper.

Your time is always worth a lot, assuming you're productive.

My view is that if you're serious, get the best tools for the job, but use common sense. I've NEVER met a founder of a startup company run out of money because of apps or tools.

At my last startup we had a policy of "get whatever will help you be more productive, period". On average we spent 2k per developer upfront and about $500/year for apps and tools. That was for everything. Dev tools, office apps, services, books, etc...

One side benefit was that devs never complained about not having tool X and it generally helped morale, even more than free food (which actually costs more).

This was, of course, for our team. YMMV.

Where I live, you could rent a 4 bedroom apartment for that kind of money

Which is the same as saying if you can spend $20 or even $45 to go an hour faster towards building your dream, go for it.

You can make personal decisions the same way. Just use an after-tax rate.

And no matter what the arena, avoid reducing your most important activities to some dollar value.

* Use the free version of everything, and when you run into the limitations tell the company you are working with that you are a startup -- they will likely make an exception for you, small businesses hold a place is many people's hearts

* Barter your time (instead of money) for things you really need, such as trading blog posts with a company you want to get free services from

* Become a customer of your customers - make non-monetary trades while you're both growing, because you have being cash-strapped in common (only do this within reason)

* DO NOT pay for a PR agency or do trade shows, find ways to hack these traditional promotional tactics (contact me if you want ideas, or check out constraintmarketing.com)

* Use GetSatisfaction for your online forums, the free version is pretty awesome. +1 Zendesk comment someone mentioned already

* Use Expensify for expense reporting (you'll need this as soon as you have your first sales/marketing type)

* If you have investors (even angels), try to get your investors to let you work out of their office space. Chances are they are on the road a ton and won't care

* When you're too big to borrow space, try a coffee shop that is dead during the day and make friends with the owner. They'll appreciate the regular business

* Coworking sounds expensive at "$500 a desk" but do it Hong Kong style, 2 or 3 people to a desk or coming in at different times during the day

* When you rent a space, try to get the previous tenants to throw in the furniture they're going to have to pay to dispose of anyway

* Don't do company credit-cards until you absolutely have to, the founding team should be willing to take the personal risk and be responsible for late fees (heaven forbid)

* Order promotional materials from Fedex or Office depot - a business account gets you 20% of everything. A single good-looking retractable standup banner looks professional, travels well, and lasted me over a year at our startup before we had more swag

* Pick ONE promotional giveaway item, make it awesome, and order in bulk. This will save you money long term, while still building brand, but don't both having pens, keychains, dongles, widgets, gadgets, etc. try just a tshirt

* set a travel policy about the cost of flights, and take public transportation instead of cabs. Remember, you are cash poor and time rich (sort of). Look for deals like the JetBlue all-you-can-eat or Virgin America $39 flights, snag them, and figure out who to visit at those destinations

* buy a coffee maker and those little K-cups from Bed, Bath, and Beyond -- you'll save a TON on going for Starbucks, both in time and money. In SF a latte costs $4!

* Strike up a regular "rate" with a single restaurant where you take all your clients, potential investors, etc. so that you can still treat them well but save 20-30%

and of course I have to say: * use OpenVBX to set up a business phone line with a simple menu that forwards to various cell phones "press 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc." and only pay for what you use

Also try libraries. They have free internet access and have conference rooms you can use for meetings, sometimes for free.

Pirating it outright is straight up bad for you and for your startup. If you are successful, someday you might have employees. How can you get any respect from anyone if you tell them to load up a pirated copy of something. Even if not, self respect is an important thing (even if subconsciously). If you know you're cutting corners, you'll end up be less motivated to follow through on things.

Whatever, just dont do it. It's stupid.

No. Black and white. Sorry.

Edit: Don't know why people are downvoting, but to clarify: I wasn't sure if jeb was using TPB for the same purpose as we are or if he was suggesting TPB as a way to take a break (movies, music, games etc)

Pixelmator did not have Layer Groups, Layer Styles or vector Shapes when I tested it. Does it now?

Work from home. If you work with a team use Talker and Teambox.

Don't pay yourself as much as you normally would until you reach profitability. If you work from home this shouldn't be a problem. You may end up saving lots of money this way.

In my experience, teams who work from home for an extended period of time can start to lose focus and productivity. This means it takes longer to build your product, and you end up paying a lot more in salary.

By having an office (usually only a few hundred, to a few thousand dollars a month in expense), you are able to save a lot in salary (tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month), because your team will be more focused and productive.

Scenario 1: we once thought we needed more developers to build our minimum viable feature set "on time." Since we pretended that we had no money (which isn't far from the truth anyway), we worked on improving our productivity, doing away with fluff features, and eliminating all non-productive uses of our time. That has helped us tremendously both in terms of building a product that is easy to understand as well as enhancing our work ethic.

Scenario 2: time to get some Beta users. If we weren't treating money in the bank as hands-off money, we would've splurged on some AdWords (which may or may not help us get the users we want). Instead, we worked with no cash (literally zero dollars) and tried to acquire early users using the basics: direct marketing, inbound marketing, social media activity, etc. That forced us to be creative.

Fundamentally, the best way to save money is to deceive yourself, as best as possible, that you have no money to spend -- that it's hands-off money, unless the company absolutely, absolutely needs the money and there is no other alternative. We had alternatives, so we skipped the spending. Not saying that this approach is optimal, but it sure keeps cash where it belongs: your bank account.

I know a small business owner who has a mythical staff member called Tony. Tony collects the money by being a pitbul...this is very successful as it allows the company owner to do what he does best and he leaves the mythical Tony to chase the money.

They have a great system. My calls (around 5 a day) are usually answered by the same lady. She answers calls for around 30-40 other companies so she cant remember individual callers. She uses caller ID and software on her PC prompt her. So for regular callers she can say "hi Pete, how are you? How are the kids? Did you like your holiday? The reception is much better tis time....let me try to put you through to the support department....".

Fantastic!

Frugal: "Let's buy these computers when they go on sale."

Cheap: "Our engineers can do with a ten-year old desktop with a 533 MHz Celeron processor."

The sad thing is that I'm only half exaggerating.

We have simply setup a groupchat and added everyone in the company.

We have tried almost every other interpretation of an internal network. This one just works.