The best developer I've ever worked with was a freelancer named Alex in Belarus who worked for $8/hour. I hired him back in 2007 to write a CMS for a heavy data-driven site in PHP. The client needed to be able to upload multi-sheet Excel spreadsheets with formulas, and have the results of the formulas be written into the appropriate tables in the database. Alex did it in about 3 business days, and the code he wrote was hands down the cleanest object-oriented PHP I have ever seen. The only bad part about working with someone in Belarus is payment. It costs about $40 for a wire transfer, and you can't send it directly to Belarus without the recipient having to fill out government paperwork detailing where the money came from. We ended up sending wire transfers in Euros to a bank in Latvia.