The Ski Locker: Running a Coworking Space in Rural France on Cobot
High in the French Alps, The Ski Locker is a French coworking space at the junction of France, Switzerland, and Italy – built for digital nomads and outdoor enthusiasts who want to build a career without leaving the mountains. Founded in Chamonix in 2014, it runs on Cobot to keep the admin quiet while a small, part-time team stays focused on the community they came to build.
Favorite Cobot features
The Story Behind The Ski Locker
The Ski Locker is a rural coworking space with a clear point of view: work should fit life, not the other way around. The four founders had already traded city offices for the French Alps and were building careers from Chamonix when they decided to stop keeping it to themselves.
Opened in 2014, the space sits 100 meters from the Aiguille du Midi lift in Chamonix Sud, on the border where France, Switzerland, and Italy converge. It has around 35 desks across 200 sqm, a meeting room with 4K displays and Chromecast, a shared kitchen with free tea and coffee for members, beanbags, and an outdoor picnic table for the summer. It's a proper workspace, but one that makes no apology for its surroundings.
The members reflect the founders' own background: mostly people from creative and tech industries who used to work in big cities, discovered what it felt like to work from the mountains, and didn't want to go back. The mix is international – hikers, skiers, snowboarders, freelancers, remote workers – and deliberately sociable. The Ski Locker is also part of the Mountain Coworking Alliance, giving members reciprocal access to coworking spaces across mountain towns worldwide.
Membership options range from a full-time dedicated desk for Chamonix locals to flexi plans, week passes, and day passes for people just passing through. That flexibility is part of what makes the space work for its community – and part of what made running it on spreadsheets increasingly untenable.
Today the space is managed by Patrik, who handles day-to-day operations alongside his own full-time job, Nicola, who helps in the office, and Chris, who manages finances.
Operational Challenges for a Rural Coworking Space
A seasonal mountain town creates a membership profile that doesn't sit still. Digital nomads come through for a week or a month. Locals take dedicated desks over winter then drop to flexi plans in summer. International visitors pick up day passes. Plan changes are constant, and so are the invoices that go with them.
For years, The Ski Locker tracked all of it in Excel. It worked at first, but as the member base grew and the flow of short-stay visitors picked up, the gaps started to show. Payments got lost. Late invoices piled up. And with no dedicated front desk, there was no easy way to know, at any given moment, who was a current paid-up member and who wasn't.
For a team running a coworking space on the side of their regular jobs, spending hours each month chasing invoices wasn't sustainable.
‘’The biggest reason for switching to Cobot, was that we were handling all our payments on Excel, which you can really lose track of.’’
How The Ski Locker Keeps Operations Simple with Cobot
The core problem was billing. With a rotating membership and a high volume of short-term passes, manual invoicing meant constant follow-up. Cobot's Automated Invoicing and Payments replaced the spreadsheet entirely – invoices go out automatically, late payments are flagged without anyone having to check, and plan changes are tracked in one place. Patrik estimates he saves around 5 hours a month on invoice chasing alone.
The second problem was access. Without a front desk, there was no reliable way to control who could use the space on any given day. The Ski Locker solved this through Cobot's IronWifi/RADIUS integration: Wi-Fi access is tied directly to membership status, so only members with an active plan or a valid day pass can connect. When credits run out or a membership lapses, access is cut automatically. That meant the team could drop the front desk entirely and trust the system to sort it out.
🇫🇷 For a space operating in France, it also helped that Cobot is fully available in French, removing any language barrier for local members signing up or managing their own accounts.
Cobot is also compliant with French E-Invoicing requirements.
Results with Cobot:
- Around 5 hours a month saved on manual invoice chasing.
- No front desk required – Wi-Fi access enforced automatically via RADIUS.
- Billing, plan changes, and late payment tracking handled without manual intervention.
- Full French-language interface – no language barrier for local members.
Advice for Other Spaces Considering Cobot
"Switching to Cobot allowed us not to have to worry about tracking invoices. Also, the radius feature means that we don’t really need to have a reception or keep track of who is who, as those who don’t have credits can't access the wifi, which makes my life easier as I also work full time."
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