who are these poor souls in the "Under $20" and "$20-$40" range?
I think this highlights an issue with this poll: the potentially huge disparity in cost of living.
Where I live (Western Canada) this is below our minimum wage mandated by law. But renting a single bedroom apartment is also nearing $2000/month.
Renting single bedroom apartment must be something around $500 here for good apartments and down to $200 if you're not very picky (we don't really use concept of bedroom, we use total number of rooms excluding kitchen, and one-room apartments probably are most popular for renting).
Now moved to and working in Europe as a TAC engineer for $18.5/h.
I remember I used to only bill for like 70% of hours I worked because I felt bad if there was some task that I couldn't implement right away or a bug I had to figure out.
These days my rate is about $60/h working for a US company with 9 years of experience.
As a result I decided to base my rates on what's the average for my particular position in my country. This way I feel at least a bit less guilty.
It's a good salary here, though I think some are making more by working directly with clients abroad, but it's difficult to bring your money to the country.
We connected and now we both work for an Aussie company as freelancers (me doing mobile). Now he has a much more reasonable rate at around 40 USD which is quite ok in Malaysia (where he moved to).
But if you setup an offshore company in another country (e.g. Seychelles) you pay a small yearly fee (e.g. 1500 EUR) and would be able to keep all of your income, provided you don't send the money to Thailand in the same year that you've earned it (so you need about a year in savings to live on). In such situations I think it's not too much work involved.
Regulations for digital nomads might improve soon in Thailand I believe, so working legally as a single person company in Thailand could become easier hopefully.