The general function of this card is similar to Personal Workshop, but the differences matter.
They are similar in the respect that these are two different 1 resources that let you install hosted programs and counters in the middle of a run, sometimes with a small discount. That's the core functionality that a Shaper needs, really; being able to see the ice and prepare moments before you slam into it.
However, Paule's Cafe represents a more significant risk-reward payout and build-around.
With Personal Workshop, the only thing you need to do to get the discount is wait. This only gets you 1 credit of value per turn; but as long as you can keep something on it at all times, you're guaranteed that drip econ. You can also afford to wait a very long time; there's no hurry to install anything once it's on the workshop, apart from the risk of getting tagged and the corp blowing the resource up.
Paule's Cafe, meanwhile, is actually a cost, if you don't have any connections installed. Assuming that you are installing the one discounted card per turn, you need 2 connections in order to see the same discount as Personal Workshop. Any turn you take off, you're losing the economic benefit. And if you double-install on one turn, you're losing the benefit and still paying the 1-credit overhead.
The best-case scenario, on the other hand, is pretty good. If you can get down 3 or 4 persistent connections, you start to generate some serious advantage. Getting an instant-speed install at a discount of 2 or 3 credits every turn adds up extremely quickly.
But, that is kind of difficult. Any strategy built around unique cards has the problem of "dead draws"--by putting more than one copy of any unique card in your deck, you run the risk of drawing it when you already drew an earlier copy, wasting the click. If your only dead draw is a second copy of your console, that's reasonable, but if you're filling your deck with unique connections you start to have a statistically appreciable number of dead draws, counteracting the economy of the cafe.
You can avoid this by having a deck full of 1-off connections...but then you run into the problem of how many viable connections there actually are in your format. If you're playing weak connection cards just to fuel the Cafe, you're weaking your deck's overall game plan.
The 4 influence also is pretty prohibitive to put into any non-Shaper deck.
Overall, I think this is strictly worse than Personal Workshop. But Paule's cafe is Standard-legal and the Workshop isn't, and so any Shaper deck which is already running 1 or 2 connections could consider slotting a singleton Cafe without worrying about it.
