Ask HN: Freelance developer hit the ceiling: what to do next?

$100k per year is very good. There are lots of people who would love to earn that much. No wonder you are in the top 10!

Without knowing what your skills are, it's hard to make suggestions. But ... have you looked at working at a top notch company where your skills would be very much in demand. For example, with the right skills you could land a very well paying job in banking in say Frankfurt or Zurich. I've worked for a Zurich insurance company and that was one of the best paid gigs I've ever had.

If i trust Numbeo.com, i'll need $530K pre-tax to have same consumption in Zurich as i now do in Vilnius... So... not even the slightiest chance. Not even mentioning that my wife makes another $40K or so so combined that will put our household income requirement close to $900K pre-tax... Simply not possible, period. I don't think any full-time job opportunity which is not a lottery (early employee at a startup) can be that thing. I need something remote.

You are not spending 100% of your income, right? You only need to double or triple the income you spend on rent and living costs, not the portion left over for savings to keep the same standard of living.

That said, if you are earning $100k in Vilnius, then it will be extremely difficult to find a higher-paying employment offer relative to living costs anywhere in the world. Maybe you can make 1.5-2x that if you go to work in finance - but you will most likely need to move to some of the most expensive cities (Zurich, London, etc) in the world.

The typical way of increasing income as a freelancer, after maxing out the hourly rate on your own is to start a development company. Partner with 1-2 freelancer friends, and start taking on bigger projects. Hire a small team of junior developers, and bill out their time as well. Grow. Start taking on fixed-bid mid-sized enterprise and government projects.

But this can be a very tedious and soul-crushing change, especially at the stage where you have only a few junior developers on staff: you will need to move from doing actual development work to reviewing their code, and handling "management and sales".

If that doesn't sound like something for you, perhaps instead consider:

* Moving to somewhere with even lower cost of living than Vilnius. Hell, move to the next beach-front villa somewhere in Asia every 6 months.

* Be more picky about accepting work - optimise for how much fun they seem to be, not only the hourly rate.

I am spending 100% of my income :), 4 years ago when i maxed out i was saving like 30-40%, but expenses always tend to grow, and when income doesn't it doesn't end well.

Agency - i tried, so far it didn't work. I haven't found a single client who wanted me as an agency. I think it works differently from freelancer sales: you pitch to totally different people in different situations. My Upwork study also included a separate study of agency success, and it was overwhelmingly negative, there are very, very few successful agencies on Upwork, looks like whole agency thing doesn't work there. Of those not in India/Pakistan and thus working for $10/h (something clearly impossible in my case), there is just 1 really successful one, visibly making >$1M a year: https://www.polcode.com/en/ and a few others making $200-$500K a year, but i seriously don't want to go from 1 person business to 20 person business for 2x raise or 200 person business for 5x raise. And i don't believe i can pull it off. This is something completely unrelated to what i do now, i'd be as good trying to switch careers into an opera singer.

I tried to do that in my home country (Argentina), if you want to get new customers as an agency, you should go outside upwork and the freelance sites. Which probably is not what you want.

Probably a good choice (and a challenging one), would be to build a new freelancer site, targeting better and bigger customers, not the classic freelancer customer which make decisions based on price.

Obviously this site should get onboard top notch developers/freelancers and curate them.

How do you spend $140k/yr in Vilnius? Is that a very extravagant lifestyle?

It sounds to me like you have a great life and should be pretty happy with it.

If you are in the top 10 on UpWork currently, then very few people in the world know how to achieve what you have already achieved, much less improve upon it. You can try to look for ways to improve your income further, but most people are not going to know an answer for you.

An idea: Try to get a London, Paris or whatever high paying job where you can go remote once you have proved yourself.

Eh, Paris & London still aren't enough. You have to go the top, San Francisco/Ny/Washington etc.

Bad idea, i want to get my EU passport first. To do so, i must stay in.

I meant as remote clients/employers.

US companies generally want to hire people with right to work in US, even if working remote.

How about investing some of that money? Like Real State or trading or bootstrapping a business.

Generate passive income on the side, there are only 24 hours in a day and you cant expect that your salary will grow exponentially.

I dated a CFO of a EU system-forming bank, so i don't believe in passive investment at all.

Starting a business in a place which has everything already? Not a chance.

One chance may be doing angel investing. I am researching it.

Have you tried https://www.toptal.com/ ? They say they have better freelancers/clients.

I tried, they really don't. Yes they pay vastly higher rates than Upwork (similar to what i get on Upwork, that is), but control you a lot more, because their cut is higher, and their clients are a lot more qualified. Not good for business.

Thank you for the insight, I was thinking of registering there. I have an account in freelancer.com, do you find that Upwork is better?

What are your skills?

What skills do you want to be using?

Is this important? As far as i seen the ceiling is about same everywhere on Upwork, about $40 an hour for long-term full-time work and $70-$90 for short-term gigs.

For someone who programmed since the age of 10 learning a new programming language is easy. I started on oDesk as a Flash developer (it was 2009 - heyday of Flash), then gradually moved onto other stuff, my most recent new language was Go (i did PubNub Go SDK). Right now i am coding in Python but i can easily be doing something else next month.

But really, i don't think skills are an answer here. At least not technical skills. There is no way i could be making $200K instead of $100K by learning any kind of technical/programming skills. What i need is new markets.

Some enterprise Java devs, big data experts and algo trading specialists earn $200k+ in the top cities.

Not sure what you mean by "new markets". Do you mean new markets for your programming skills? Or are you thinking of changing careers, for example going into sales or big ticket consulting?

Top cities - in the EU? Like, which ones? Currently i am in Vilnius which has quite a low cost of living. I don't think i want to go to say Paris for $200K pre-tax. I will be clearly worse off there. Also once i get passport (i am a Russian immigrant), i plan to move to Asia where cost of living is lower yet - unless by that time i get enough to stop worrying about money.

New markets - some new way of selling my programming services which don't share the 'race to the bottom' style of Upwork bidding.

I kind of assume that if i am one of the just a few top people on Upwork there must be a way to get several times as much if i am on a market where average skills are comparable to mine.

Big ticket consulting-maybe! Where do i start? Any links to read?

So i am looking for advice which i imagine could look like 'you have to take some authoritative skill tests at %s, attend networking events at %s and %s, and learn how to write killer cover letters as the guy in %s book says, and you'll get to $200k a year working remotely within a year or two'. I am not looking for a full time job - any one which could be better than what i get now will be in a place which is very expensive to live, and where taxes are high (in Lithuania we pay lowest tax in EU), so unless there is a magic job which pays $500K or so, i don't win anything.

To get to 200K a year working remotely, the primary skill you need to learn is how to sell. Forget about authoritative skill tests etc. There is no magic answer to this. It is going to take a lot more than a killer cover letter though.

Networking events may work if you know how to use them effectively.

Best job I interviewed was for up to $250+K/year remotely. I didn't get the job though (from stackoverflow).

I will hopefully soon have your problem too on upwork. My idea is to:

1. extreme specialization. Example: I like backend, high performance, low-level, databases (rdbms & nosql). So I'll probably go into lowe-level java/c++/c database coding. And then either contract on this or get a job Example: antirez gets a nice San Francisco wage coding full-time open-source redis.

2. startup Different ideas. But if I get good at the low-level-high-performance-thing even something with that.

Regarding TrackStudio, do you seriously have those AAA companies as clients?

yeah! but:

1) i am no longer a part of the company. i can link you up with the sole owner if you have any interest though. 2) it is nowhere near successful really. more of a zombie startup.

i tried to do all i could to help it out, even prepared to apply to YC, but i couldn't convince the partner (current sole owner, i left it and given up my share) to agree to go to U.S. if accepted.

Interesting. There are tons of project management solutions, including some very popular ones... So these AAA companies just buy/subscribe to many of them? What's the reasoning behind this...

Or maybe you've done some target marketing, approached some middle-managers in those companies or similar.. Interesting how did you get such sales. (But your [ex] product looks great, indeed).

Btw, I'm in the same situation - living in eastern Europe, working remotely and getting "western compensation". So I'm stuck here... When you adjust for cost of living, and especially housing, moving west doesn't make sense...

Probably yes, they buy many. There was no way to track how much they make use of them, but some probably do, because they bought continued support. In Russia it is a lot more popular and some AAA companies in Russia order some customization work so they are serious about it. No special marketing - they bought from site. Anyway, that doesn't make even a good living, let alone allow for hiring staff. Owner makes most of his living working from Upwork too now.

LOL now try to think how coding people making $10K+ a month in Ukraine feel like! Many of them have 10-acre villas, chauffeur driven cars and full time gardeners. Real upper class. That's what i call being stuck!

While we're at it - one advice - I left upwork (it was odesk back then) many years ago, because, as everyone knows, it is race to the bottom. So next step for you could be to eliminate the middle man. Reach to clients directly. Try searching gigs on sites such as wewrokremotely, wfh.io, SO remote jobs, etc.. Even if you find interesting work on upwork, and posting includes contact details - contact the client directly, outside upwork. And no need to mention upwork in your CV. You can mention your past clients/companies and relevant work.

Regarding the product - I guess if you had enterprise pricing separately (maybe as "Contact us") you could've arranged better deals with those AAA shops... not sure :)

In fact, i sometimes did the reverse: found clients outside of Upwork and brought them in. I am even more likely to do it now since June 1 when the commissions drop from 10% to 5%. Upwork provides guaranteed billing... It is extremely difficult to extract payments when nobody does it for you.

Enterprise pricing page - good idea, i will tell Maxim (owner). upd: he said that in fact decisions on buying it is usually taken by IT department heads who then massively rework the system for their own needs, so a higher priced sale would be impossible, in many cases they already prefer open source.

In fact, even selling whole company failed through - interested buyers who definitely had money, eventually refused to pay even $100K. Working on Upwork has definively been way more productive activity.

I'm freelancing almost 10 years now and so far I've never had any single issue with payments - I just send PDF invoices and get funds through bank/wire transfer. Even when I was on odesk - I've only logged offline time, i.e. haven't used that spying/monitoring desktop client.

What kind of clients do you pitch to?

Is your manager/main contact typically a business boss or technical?

Lastly, how much do you charge?

That sounds interesting because in my experience people don't pay unless they are forced to (some system does it for them, or they need something more from you so forced to pay for the previous work to get that done, etc.)

I've only worked with established companies/startups and maybe this is the reason. Usually, after initial talks I deal with tech people (CTO, lead engineer, etc..). I don't want to comment exact numbers here, but usually I charge 3-figures per hour for short term tasks, somewhat less for long-term. I have to say, I've tripled my rate since I left odesk... :)

Ah then you are a different category from mine. There is no way i could charge that money. Or at least i don't have ways to approach clients that pay as much. I don't know who it can potentially be and why any work i could do may worth as much.

Not on upwork, that for sure... As an experiment, when you reach to your next client directly (outside upwork) - double your current rate. That is feasible with proper clients e.g. from Germany, UK, North America, etc...

I can't imagine a repeatable way to get clients without Upwork. How do you find them?

As I mentioned: HN, weworkremotely, wfh.io, SO, you can even try googling (with "remote" keyword).

I think most of these places contain people who actually know what they are doing and understand programming matters well. No 'walk-in consumers with cash to spend who think they can build their own startup'.

Yes, the type of clients most likely is different (from upwork).