Freelancer does much, much worse things for your business by dint of using Freelancer than any of the problems you have written about above.

You're tolerating a 50%+++ discount to your easily achievable potential rate every day. Next to that, $25 is nothing.

You're optimizing your business to churn out $X00 projects for clients who are, out of the universe of consulting clients, pretty bad. Your projects are, structurally, not going to leave you with any impressive accomplishments which you could take to other potential clients to justify your newer, higher rates. You're overwhelmingly going to be stuck doing the most boring work possible with your skill set.

You're tolerating a higher than average amount of "patholgoical customers" in your client pool -- people who have no business managing a software development project, with unreasonable expectations, poor managerial skills, and the ability to stiff you for virtually any reason.

You should start prospecting for clients yourself. You'll have a minor hit in billing efficiency while learning how to do this, but then be able to start selling days/weeks at a time of availability at actual professional rates rather than competing with people charging $10 to $20 an hour. Turn some of those clients into referrals and some into recurring engagements / retainers / etc, and your business will be much, much more stable, more lucrative, and less stressful.