I'm really happy Zig is gaining momentum. I do hope they can raise more money. If people are paid as freelancers, 50$ is a really low compensation. You'll have to pay health insurance, retirement etc. out of your own pocket. In Germany, the rule of thumb is if you're earning below ~70€ / hour as a freelance sw dev, it is better to be employed.
Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year.
Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number.
Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.
Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks.
If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.
Assuming 100% utilisation is a typical beginner's mistake. You will usually have some time you cannot bill, most importantly time between projects, but also customer acquisition and certifications. There are also types of insurance that you don't need as an employee. If you do the math, the conditions are not as favourable as they may appear from the outset.
I will concede though that a reliable long-term project such as being a paid Zig contributor is a special case, and might warrant some discount.
You can buy health insurance separately, but that doesn't excuse you from paying taxes if you're receiving income. And once you're paying taxes, there's no point to buy health insurance separately, as you will automatically qualify for "free" healthcare. The only time it makes sense to buy health insurance separately is if you have retired at a young age or you're cheating on your taxes.
Of course, all of this varies by country, but I imagine the percentages are relatively similar. Germany is a more expensive country, so I can see how 70EUR/h might be a reasonable number there.
The downside of socialised health care is the extensive waiting lists for everything.
I live under the NHS, and while it's a brilliant system, I do understand those with the means wanting to avoid it.
So that's about 125k invoiced income as an entrepreneur. It's not your salary yet. Again, depends on the country (you may have to pay lower taxes as a solo-preneur than what would be paid by someone employing you), but the employer usually pays more than what the employee makes in gross salary. Calculating with the Hungarian wedge, one of the highest in the EU, the net is about 50% of what the employer pays in total.
My guess is that it's probably equal to around 85-100k of gross salary. Definitely not bad (based on what I can see from here), seems to be on the higher and, but doesn't seem exceptional either.
Oh, well and you also have to account for downtimes as you'll probably won't quit before finishing your project (and if you won't, you'll almost certainly will have unpaid down times between projects).
200-210 days of billable work (30 days holidays, sick days, conferences, downtime, pre-sales etc.) also a 100% utilization is often unrealistic but in this case might work.
~40% taxes ~9.000€ health insurance / year ~1.500€ liability insurance / year ~15-20% pension savings (personal preference) - various other business related expenses
Very rough estimates: With 70€/h that'll be around 120k€ - 40k€ taxes - ~10k€ insurances - 15k€ pension = 55k€ That's not bad but also not an extraordinary amount and that's without any accounting for the extra risk, own hardware etc.
Got to start somewhere.
A language ran by one guy to challenge the most popular language ever, epic mistake.