>> "You are now a consultant" <- this kills me.
there are so many steps and effort before rising your rates, and becoming a consultant This is so similar to the "how to draw an owl" meme
I ended up embarassing myself a couple of times, by either:
- asking for a high day rate when I lacked experience (e.g., for freelance Rails work, when I kinda knew Rails but lacked experience with most of the tooling, testing frameworks, etc)
- trying to sell "consulting" work when I had only a vague idea how consulting worked.
So, yeah, while "charge more!!!" might be a useful message for underconfident programmers who don't know their own value, it's too simplistic and it omits many essential steps.
My takeway: if you plan to freelance long-term, you should treat it as a business, and plan to build a specialism. Once you've built a specialised skillset, and demonstrated credibility, then you should start systematically looking for higher-paying clients, and be confident in asking for what you are worth. But you have to know you are worth it, first. Once you've done that for a while, then you can start thinking about business-level problems and doing something higher level (which requires nailing a whole bunch of soft skills, too).
Another factor to consider is that if you're in a major city, there are probably other programmers doing freelance/contract work in your skillset, which you can use to gauge what a sensible rate would be, and what knowledge you need to gain.
Oh and - there's also the factor that as a newbie freelancer you often find the really crappy low-end clients that have a fixed budget and high expectations (e.g., small local businesses. I have nothing against small local businesses, but they're not good clients for freelance coding work). I went through a lot of stress working on such projects. Working for more high-paying, professional clients (digital agencies, banks that hire a lot of contractors, etc) is ironically a lot less stressful.
And if a lead enquires about why you're so much more expensive than that option they found on some cheapo website, you can spell out the consultant's version of the iron triangle: cheap, competent, available; pick two.
Step 2 is to network with people a few years ahead of you in your specialism, who can help you figure out how to do more "high-level" work in whatever you do and maybe bring you on as a junior person for some of their projects
Step 3 is to demonstrate credibility (portfolio of projects using your specialism, professional online presence, know how to sell yourself to clients, etc)
Step 4 is to increase your rates and start labeling yourself as a consultant