Hacker News Reader

Comment by keviv | Hacker News Reader

I'm a full-stack developer and I was working full-time till last month and freelanced occasionally. After leaving my job I decided to take up freelancing and currently, I'm making $35 an hour working on CakePHP/Laravel/Angular project which is low considering my experience (11 years). I usually charge upwards of $50 but this time I made an exception because the company is looking to raise Series A (which means more work at a better rate in future).

Last month, I got paid pretty good money for a React+Redux project.

Mail me at mail+efl@vivekgupta.com

I'm currently free for 20-30 hours a week and looking for more work.

View on HN

I suggest you increase you triple your rates. Clients want good solutions to their problems, and a low rate suggests that you do poor quality work.

And if you are good, (which it sounds like you are), the only reason why you can't charge more is in your head. So charge more. Stop acting like some first-year freelancer and start charging what you are worth.

Thanks! Got your point.

I don't where you are located, but in the US, $35/hr as a contractor is absurdly low. Your take home is closer to half of that after you consider all of your tax implications.

That's true. I'm in India and I pay 30% of that as taxes. So, basically I make $24.5 dollars after taxes. I usually charge $50-60 an hour for PHP work and I charged $80 an hour for a small ReactJS project last month. The only problem is I don't know where to find clients.

I suggest you invest in yourself, and learn how to find clients. There's plenty of free info on doubleyourfreelancing.com, and I'd start diving into the blog articles there.

And if you want to invest in yourself, I wrote a course that you could take and it has a whole module on finding more clients. Don't feel pressured to spend any money, but I think it's pretty solid, and you can check it out here: http://freelance-college.teachable.com/p/freelance-college-w...

At the very least I have some lessons that you can preview in full for free (just scroll to the bottom).

Cool. I'll check it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com