Network School: the honest review.
but first: is this even for you?
Check your NS Compatibility
Network School is an intense, focused place to live and work. Take this brutally honest 10-question compatibility test to see whether you'd thrive at Network School or should look elsewhere.
ok, you'd survive it. here's what 'it' actually is.
A live-in startup society in Astana, Kazakhstan for founders, remote workers, researchers and creators. Monthly cohorts and no syllabus. You get density, infrastructure and a calendar of optional sessions.
One city.
One building.
One month.
Network School runs on Society-as-a-Service. One price covers the things a society normally makes you assemble yourself: where you sleep, what you eat, where you train, where you work, and who is around you while you do it.
The day has three tracks: Learn, Burn and Earn. Learn technology, with applied AI at the centre. Burn calories, with training at the centre of the culture. Earn remotely, on a coworking floor open around the clock because your colleagues are in another timezone.
None of the calendar is compulsory, which is the single most important thing to understand about the format. Two people in the same cohort can have completely different months, and the variable is almost always how much of it they showed up for.
what the fee covers.
Membership starts at $900/month and bundles housing, food, gym and coworking into one number. Compare it with rent plus food plus a gym plus a desk. Rent alone is the wrong comparison. Arrive with a laptop; flights and visas come next.
and where does all of this happen?
Astana, Kazakhstan: the country's purpose-built capital, a city of well over a million people that has gone up almost entirely since 1997.
A capital,
not a compound.
This matters more than it sounds. Being in Astana means you are not dependent on the campus for everything. There are supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitals, gyms, a real restaurant scene and delivery apps that work. Weekends have somewhere to go.
Then there is the winter, and it deserves a straight answer: Astana is one of the coldest capital cities on earth. Deep winter runs well below freezing, cold snaps reach −30°C, and the wind crosses open steppe with nothing to slow it. The city is built for it and interiors are genuinely warm. Your willingness to leave the building is the thing that changes.
Fly into NQZ, about 20km out. Expect one or two stops from most of the world, and long connections in winter.
what does it actually look like?
Photographs of the community and its facilities. These aren't brochure renders. Still, ask to see the specific campus before you pay.
don't just take my word for it. field notes from members.
Edited for length only.
want to go deeper? 5 guides.
Long-form pieces for the questions that don't fit in an FAQ answer.
How to travel to NS:
getting to Astana in 2026.
Rooms: what to confirm.
How a month actually fills up.
Kazakhstan visa: every option explained.
Food: included meals & the city.
got a specific question? probably one of these 83.
Every question a prospective member tends to ask, organised into the nine things you will actually want to know about.