Running a company from Prague, costed honestly

Half past two in the afternoon

That is when my day changes character. Until 14:30 Prague time, the American half of my customer base and network is asleep, and nothing arrives. From 14:30 to about 19:00 the East Coast is awake and my calendar fills. After 19:00 I can take San Francisco if I want to, and I mostly do not.

So the working shape is: about five and a half hours of uninterrupted building, then four hours of contact. Not by discipline. By geography. That is the single largest operational fact about running a company from here, and it is worth more than the cost savings people usually lead with.

I have been based in Prague for long enough to have stopped romanticising it. Here is the honest ledger.

What the timezone actually buys

Central European Time sits at UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer. The practical consequence is that Prague overlaps meaningfully with three regions in one working day, which very few places do.

• London: one hour behind. Effectively the same working day. No cost at all.
• US East Coast: six hours behind. Their 09:00 is your 15:00. You get a clean four-hour overlap without either side doing anything unpleasant.
• India and the Gulf: three to four and a half hours ahead. Their afternoon is your morning.
• US West Coast: nine hours behind. Their 09:00 is your 18:00. Workable, but it eats your evening, and doing it daily is how people burn out here.

The arbitrage is not that you work fewer hours. It is that the morning block is structurally protected. In London I never managed a reliable four-hour focus block, because a colleague or a client could always reach me at 10:00 and did. Here, nobody who could interrupt me is awake. I get roughly 22 protected hours a week without negotiating with anyone.

The cost is the mirror image. If your business requires same-day responsiveness to San Francisco, you will find yourself on calls at 20:00 four nights a week, and Prague stops being an advantage and becomes a tax on your evenings. I know two founders who moved back to the Bay for exactly this reason and I think both were right to.

The timezone is not cheaper hours. It is a guaranteed morning nobody can take from you.

The hiring pool, specifically

The engineering talent here is genuinely strong and genuinely narrow, and people conflate the two.

What is deep: backend, systems, embedded, data engineering, and anything with a formal-methods flavour. The Czech Technical University and Masaryk in Brno turn out people with real mathematical training, and the local industry history — Avast, JetBrains' Prague presence, Socialbakers, a large Google and Red Hat engineering footprint — means there is a supply of senior engineers who have worked on products with millions of users. You can hire an excellent senior backend engineer here. It is not hard.

What is thin: product design, growth engineering, and enterprise sales into the US market. The design pool in particular is small, and the best people are usually already employed by one of five studios or working remotely for Berlin and London salaries. If your differentiation is design or distribution rather than engineering, Prague is a harder place to build a team than the internet suggests.

On cost: the sensible framing is that a senior engineer in Prague is roughly 55-65% of London total cost, not the 30% people imagine. Salaries have converged considerably since remote hiring became normal. The gap that remains is real, but if you are here purely for arbitrage you will lose your best people to a remote offer from a company that will pay 90% of London and let them stay in their flat in Vinohrady. I have lost two that way.

One genuine structural advantage: the pool is small enough that reputation compounds fast. Prague's senior engineering community is a few thousand people and they know each other. If you treat people well through a redundancy or a failed project, you will be hiring on that reputation three years later. If you do not, you will find out how small the city is.

The three things that are genuinely harder

Banking and admin. This is not a small annoyance and I would weight it heavily if you are deciding. Opening a business account as a foreign founder can take four to eight weeks and a physical appointment. VAT registration is slow. You will need a Czech accountant — not a bookkeeping app, an actual person — and you should budget roughly 4,000-8,000 CZK a month for one. The tax rules around employee versus contractor status are stricter than most founders assume, and the arrangement where everyone is a self-employed živnostník is a common and increasingly risky shortcut. Get advice before you replicate what the company down the corridor does.

Hiring outside the EU. If your candidate is not an EU citizen, the employee card process runs three to six months, involves a physical embassy appointment in their home country, and can fail for procedural reasons after four months of waiting. I have had this happen. Plan on it taking two quarters or hire within the EU.

Being off the default map. Nobody is passing through Prague on their way to somewhere. In London you get four coffees a week with people you did not plan to meet; here you get zero, and the difference is not social, it is informational. You hear things later. My correction is deliberate and slightly expensive: I go to London for two days roughly every six weeks and I schedule nine to eleven meetings across those two days. It costs about £600 all-in and it is the highest-return recurring expense in the business. If you move here and do not build something like that, you will find your view of your own market is nine months stale before you notice.

What is quietly better than expected

The things I did not anticipate, in rough order of how much they matter.

1. Meeting-free mornings compound. Over a year, 22 protected hours a week is the difference between shipping a product and talking about one.
2. Physical proximity is cheap. A room for twelve people in Karlín for two days costs less than a single day's equivalent in Shoreditch, which is why the weekends I run happen here at all.
3. Employee retention is longer. People are not being poached every eleven months by a company two streets away, because that company does not exist. Average tenure in my last team here was 3.1 years against about 1.8 in the London office.
4. The city is walkable enough that the commute is genuinely near zero, which is worth an hour a day you cannot buy back any other way.

Do this before you decide

Do not decide from a spreadsheet of salary comparisons. Do this instead: take your last full month of calendar and colour every meeting by the counterparty's timezone. Then shift the whole calendar to CET and look at what falls after 19:00.

If that number is under six hours a week, Prague will probably make you more productive than wherever you are. If it is over fifteen, it will make you tired, and no cost saving compensates for that. It took me about twenty minutes to do this exercise retrospectively and I wish I had done it before the move rather than eight months after.