It's discouraging when new employees expect a certain lifestyle on joining your startup but you're runway is less than a year. Startups have been portrayed as having so many perks that there's an impossibly high standard to strive toward.
If your runway is less than a year and you don't have a proven way to self-fund from revenue, you should be careful about hiring employees at all.
It would be a red flag to me as an employer if we were close to exhausting our resources and somehow communicating to employees that they might be joining the kind of company that could afford perks of any sort.
If you're that tight, the first conversation you should be having with candidates is about the kind of company you're running. There are good developers that are willing --- with enough upside! --- to join high-risk companies like this. But most developers, sensibly, are not.
The perks are also designed to keep you there as long as possible. If you leave at a reasonable hour, you don't need catered dinner or company-provided alcohol.
