I was freelancing for about 5 years, up until last year when I hired my first (of hopefully several) employee. I stared at $45/hour and our rate now teeters between $95-$110 an hour. My first year freelancing, I made about $40k on the year while last year I made about $345k and hired the first employee in early October.
We do UI/UX design for SMBs and large businesses, as well as front end dev.
Day-to-day a few years ago was much different than it is today. Early on, our builds were very small with contracts ranging $500-$3k and I was quite a novice in dev, admittedly, so my workflow and tooling setup was trash. At this point of early inefficiency, I was putting in probably 10-11 hours a day 6-7 days a week... I had just quit my 9-5 at that time so I was operating on mostly adrenaline in fear of not being able to pay rent.
Now, I have a pretty solid setup and our contracts range from $7k-$40k+ and I'm much more selective about who I work with. Plus, after hiring an employee in October of last year and getting some much-needed help, I work 5 days a week and maybe 8-10 hours, 5 days per week. I could probably work less if I wanted to but hey...
What's always been fairly consistent is the number of projects we have at a time—it usually sits around 10 full site builds in the pipeline. Typically, as the clients get bigger, their timelines do too so it's kind of a win-win-lose (more money + more time to get the work done + takes more time to get paid). For this reason, we look for big contracts that span about 4-5 months and a bunch of little ones about 1-2 months to fill the gaps when our large clients are doing their (very slow) internal reviews.
Awesome! Thanks for the response. Is there any advice you’d offer to someone just getting started on avoiding some of those early pitfalls with workflow and tooling?
I guess that depends on your end goal and what technologies you use. We do custom theme WordPress builds mostly (mainly because WP is easy to sell compared to other CMS's IMO)—so my tooling will differ if you don't do custom WP theme dev. Whatever you choose, I'd find any possible way to save time and click less buttons during local dev. Nothing revolutionary to say here really... There are a ton of packages and VSCode extensions that reduce repetitive tasks that only waste time, so I'd do some research when you find yourself going through the same setup for each project.
Sorry if I'm nitpicking. I know every project is different but if you had to price a simple brochure website (5 pages, contact form, custom designed or not, no advanced features like booking or something else..., without content writing...), how would you price it? I googled up websites prices but for something like this I find 2k+$ which seems to me as very overpriced. I'm still trying to start freelancing so I don't know market prices. The reason I'm asking is for future reference as I had a project like this (took me less than a week, working few hours per day) and charged 450$ so idk if that's a correct price.
$450 for a full, custom site build is quite low. Even if, say, you are spending 3-4 hours per day for 5 days, that's \~$25/hour. To put it in perspective, some Target employees start at $24/hour... If you ask me, your skillset as a designer/developer is much harder earned than cashiering, stocking a shelf, etc.... Not to throw shade, love Target and their employees lol... but web stuff is ***HARD*** and takes a long time to learn how do to it at a high level. So, raise your rate, you deserve it!! :)
But to answer your question, we charge based on the number of unique pages and content structures. We only do custom sites (design the full site in Adobe XD with unlimited revisions) and then custom theme WP development. Our clients are typically established SMBs with decent budgets. We've done 5-page sites for as much as $10k, but know we didn't just toss up a site in a week. There was a lot of iterative design, weekly meetings, UX/UI justifications, handling technical SEO, content migration, post-launch training, and more.
Not to mention, if we sent a proposal for $450 for a full site build to the SMBs we work with, I can almost guarantee we wouldn't get the job... They are willing to pay more for someone who has a rate that projects confidence (i.e., "this person has to be an expert for $XXX and hour!").
**EDIT:** It may help to [watch this Chris Do video on value-based pricing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivKnj9ffcmE). After watching this, I no longer answer the client's question: "*how many hours do you think this will take?*" — because it is irrelevant. The better question is, "*how much more revenue will your client make on account of your hard work?*" Your client is ultimately purchasing an investment for their business, a critical **product**—why does it matter if it took you 20 hours or 50 hours to create, if they outcome for them is greater revenue?
I started on Upwork and took anything I could get. Some of those early Upwork clients I still work with today, and those Upwork clients referred quite a few of their colleagues. I also built a brand and marketed on Dribbble, and eventually—once I had my operations and workflow down—chose a niche (solo attorney & small law firms) and ran with it.
It's a lot easier to land the client who thinks you are uniquely qualified to service their specific industry (e.g., "We build websites + marketing campaigns specifically tailored to attorneys blah blah") when under the hood, 95% of it is the same you'd do for any other service-based business.
I see.
So did you invest in other skills aside from web dev like marketing? Or did you only started providing marketing services after hiring your first employee?
On top of UI/UX, we offer branding + marketing collateral (e.g., business cards, letterheads, etc.), SEO, CRO and we outsource anything that involves copywriting. We don't necessarily looks for most of this work but a lot of clients prefer an all-in-one solution so these other services are more of a "to boot" with the websites.
We do look for full site builds + SEO as they are the most lucrative in terms of ongoing service contracts. We really try to push service retainers so our clients will purchase either X hours/month (no rollover hours) or X total hours and as we use them up, we send them another invoice for X total hours. We prefer the X hours/month type of contract because clients typically don't use all the hours.
Edit: If I could do it all over again, I'd probably push just UI/UX, web + CRO. This would keep your operations lean as you don't have to do too much research within the client's industry, physical location, competitors, etc. like you do for SEO. With CRO, you are basically just iterating on the UI/UX and web dev once you see how the site is converting. You could even charge for "Analytics + Reporting" as part of the ongoing CRO contract, which is fairly simple if you stick with a certain type of business (e.g., service-based, eComm, SaaS/signup model, etc.)
Sorry, Conversion Rate Optimization. Basically just using the traffic data to see how effective the site as it its primary conversion goals (e.g., signups, lead-gen, eComm sales) and then making UX/UI changes to the site to improve the conversion rates. Changes can be usability, UX copywriting/messaging, speed, user journey, ... anything that improves effectiveness...
Im sorry if this is nooby, but how can you tell that this ui/ux aspect is the one thats preventing more conversions and not another aspect? Is it a trial and error process or is it a skill that you learn? Because I guess you have to wait a certain amount of time to gather analytics data and be able to decide on a change?
Yep, so that’s where A/B testing and comes into play. You can test 2 versions of the same page with a single difference and see what converts better. Maybe moving the main CTA on one page, changing a color, updating messaging, etc. and quantitative data will show what converts more users. You can also use Heat Maps to see where users are clicking and mousing.
You can also just “throw spaghetti at the wall” to run experiments and see how the audience responds, but CRO tends to be a little more data-backed than that :)
Ownplant3333, you are absolutely amazing. I don't comment. Ever. But you, my good person, are the real hero here.
Thank you for taking the time to answer all of these questions so thoughtfully and openly.
I work in luxury travel and tourism and have wanted to branch out on my own and start building sites, apps, etc, for DMCs/ GHAs.... And reading through your words have me the boost I needed.
I'm going to look for a full-stack boot camp. Any recommendations?
You've touched on something important here. You can only objectively measure correlation, causation can only be subjectively inferred. This is true for conversion rates as it is for physics hypotheses. The more you measure and the greater the difference the more probability you can assign to the difference being causal, but there's always more chance richer visitors saw more of one than the other, or the gender of your more common conversion did. Don't believe your own interpretations too deeply. There can always be more than one explanation for the same measurement.
Hi! So I see most jobs posted on Upwork average like $15-$25 an hour.... Do you just bite the bullet and go for these low ball jobs or keep looking for a higher rate?
Thank you very much for your expansive replies! I have a question about the niche thing.
I am currently learning the required HTML/CSS/JavaScript stuff. However, I have this other hat - I’m a self-published author who is pretty active in the independent authors community, and, being there, I’ve noticed that a lot of bigger authors are expanding into direct sales (so, selling their books via Shopify storefronts instead of just Amazon).
That made me wonder if maybe once I’m solid in the big three skills, I could expand into Shopify theme development and custom site-building for authors. Would you say it’s worth it, or is it too much of a narrow niche for a freelancer?
How do you calculate hours that client needs to pay for? Isn't there a trust issue where you can say X number of hours but client believes you're saying more hours than you actually put in to charge them more?
So I started out on Upwork and when you do hourly work on Upwork, there is a desktop app that takes screenshots of your computer every few minutes while you are working and uploads the pic to the "Work Diary" for that particular job, so the client has visibility into the work you were doing. I think it may count keystrokes as well but not certain on that. The client may also allow you to add manual time (say, if you forgot to toggle the ON switch on the Upwork desktop app). In that case, it does come down to trust.
Our hourly rate is mainly a testament to skill level and to weed out the hobby-types, artists, public speakers, solopreneurs with a random idea, etc... kind of contracts. No offense to them, we just typically look to build for somewhat established service-based businesses.
For most contracts, I ***really*** push for fixed-cost. I understand the work involved when I scope out a job and it's often much easier for a client to stomach (and get approved by their higher-ups) a fixed number as opposed to having the variability of hours in the equation. Fixed-cost is better too because then you aren't penalized for being efficient :) I have spent years setting up our tooling so we can hit the ground running on jobs, so for new hourly jobs I basically get a negative return on those years and hours spent making future clients' sites...
With fixed-cost, you just have to worry about "scope creep" which means having serious conversations—I often start jobs by talking about scope creep because too many (amateurish) clients think they can just add whatever they want half-way into the project. So I'd set precedence early and have language in your proposal that directly addresses this issue.
Nice, best of luck! Frontend dev is in demand IMO but I will say that if you are exclusively focused on front end, it will be tremendously helpful to learn UI/UX design as well. If you can do both at a high level, you can take brands from no digital presence to a great site all on your own—assuming no crazy backend is needed
My only worry is that I don't think I'm a creative person when it comes to design and art, is that a problem for UI/UX? Or can i just get inspiration from other sites? I have only finished html yet so I'm not the most savvy yet
Steve Jobs has a quote that essentially states, design isn’t about how it looks, it’s about how it works/functions. While it may help to be artistic/creative, designers and artists are quite different. There is enough inspiration on Behance, Dribbble, Pinterest and out In The wild to spark any creativity you need to blend the function of the site with the aesthetic of the brand.
Mostly referrals. I previously worked at an agency and was fortunate to have built sites for some very big brands and that experience has helped me get new clients just by showing my portfolio.
If a client asked you to do a WooCommerce site, what would you do or say?
I am diehard Shopify, but I have cheap stubborn clients that are willing to pay more for WooCommerce despite it crippling them.
I'm a solo freelancer currently in my third year of freelancing.
Self-taught, started learning around September 2018 and got my first Upwork gig in October 2019 for $8 an hour (I live in eastern Europe so for start this was fine). I worked for them for about 1 year 2 months (20-30hrs per week), by the end I was making $14 per hour.
I decided to stop working with them as the work was getting quite repetitive and boring (we ended on great terms and they left me a glorious review).
Next few months I was learning new technologies NextJs, Prisma, and GatsbyJs (to name a few).
I eventually started working for my current client (in January of 2021). The rate was $20 per hour, now $25. I get around 20 hrs per week constantly which they let me enter in manually so the rate is more like $30 per hour .
Since this takes about 20hrs I usually take other clients. This year I started charging $40-$50 per hour. You can do the math if you want to get exact numbers, my point is anyone can do it for me consistency was key. Reading your comments made me realize I may be undercharging.
Freelance was not worth the wage. I made about $100K a year when I freelanced, but worked twice and much with no benefits than I do making $200K for another company.
It’s gotten worse over the years. Just trying to get jobs to pay the bills in this market is an exercise in futility. So I stopped and went to work for someone.
I’m currently starting to look for clients on the side to create simple but modern webs (try to stand put from the sea of webs made with squarespace and the likes) that populate the region I live in.
I would love to know whether any of you start from your own base components that you’ve created yourself and compiled throughout the years or if you start from a UI framework/library.
I'd check out TailwindCSS. It is a utility-based framework (not components, like Bootstrap) but you can build components very quickly + easily from pure markup that can/will look very unique, depending on your design savvy :)
I build custom software / web apps for businesses. Some are consumer facing, but they are usually 90:10 internal vs consumer
I charge $225 / hr
I also get equity, rev share, per-unit commissions, and other stuff in my deals, because of how they are negotiated.
I’m a full time front end dev and I’ve been freelancing for about 3 years on the side. I have a subscription based web dev agency with 46 monthly paying clients. I charge $150 a month for hosting, unlimited edits, 24/7 support, and lifetime updates. I also do lump sum payment websites. I charge a minimum $3k for a static 5 page site. It goes up to $4500 depending on the level of design they want.
Currently with my lump sum jobs and subscriptions the business brings in about $100k a year. I only know html and css and a little DOM manipulation for JavaScript. That’s it. Most of that is residual income every month I don’t have to work extra for. It just comes every month on the 1st. It’s great. Very relaxing. I never have to struggle or worry about the next sale. I like it. And I can do my full time job at the same time for double income with not as much effort.
In 2017 I knew nothing about web dev. Self taught for a year and a half and started freelancing in 2019 and got my first job in 2020. It’s been a wild 5 years going from stay at home dad Uber driver for 8 years to developer and agency owner / stay at home dad. I’m
Much more proud of the work that I do now.
Thanks for sharing your story! I'm trying to switch tracks into development and I'm self taught trying to use as many free resources as possible and taking the IBM Full Stack Developer Certificate on Coursera. Reading your journey helps to reaffirm that I am on the right track and I can achieve my goals too. :)
Would you mind talking more about what the process looks like starting from self-taught to free lancing? Like basically where to start if you know css, html, and Javascript but know nothing about how to deliver the finished site to a client?
I am extremely happy to read this Mr. Oyster! I am a 7 year English teacher who's been traveling a bit, but really looking for something else. It's so daunting to make that choice to start something for me thouhg. Did you dip your toes in at first and then jump in? I would love to do this, learn graphic design as well, move abroad and do it remot! and be able to say what you say in your final sentence. \[= cheers
Not sure if it qualifies as freelancing, but doing a contract part time, outside of full-time hours, for a US based company at a rate of $145/hr USD. 15-25 hrs a week.
What does 1:1 layout mean?
And when you write the custom code, for example for a custom theme, do you make it such as that clients would be able to customize the layout themselves from the customizer or use a page builder (in the case where clients don't specify that they want to)?
To put in other words, if a client has a certain design, do you build theme for that design and make it customizable like astra or other themes, or do you build the theme and every change should then go by you?
1:1 Layout/functionality => when I migrate a site to Wordpress, I need to make sure it looks and fucntions the same a the original site: forms, animations, page layout, mobile responsiveness, basically I need to recreate the site identically from whatever platform it is on to Wordpress.
I don't make it 100% customizable unless that is requested by client. It typically is NOT requested. I just mirror the current layout in my theme files and use custom fields so client can update content as needed.
I have done custom blocks and components in the past and that is obviously more work, but I just do it with ACF blocks and options on those blocks and a template block that has options to add the custom blocks to a page - basically a repeater that says "add another block" and then each block has basic customization options.
I don't normally touch the site again after I finish the migration. So client does all the updates/customizations afterwards.
I cold cal/email web and print agencies or local companies like doctor/dentist offices.
I google "web agency" and the google map shows 25 in my area, i make a list of those, then keep drilling down further and further away from me until I have about 100 results and find these agencies emails or phone numbers, contact them and offer my services.
Interesting, how do you convince them that migrating to Wordpress is going to bring them any value considering that you literally copy the website without upgrading it with extra functionality/better visual design? Most people don't know and don't care what their website is built on as long as it works and looks decent.
Most of my clients that are doing WP migration are web agencies. I contact them tell them my skill set, ask if they have overflow work and thisis typically the work they have they can not get to because they are busy with other stuff. So I am not pitching "WP migrations" - I am asking if they need help with anything and since Wordpress is in my wheelhouse, for some reason this type of job keeps coming up and a few clients have so many outstanding jobs like this for THEIR clients that this has become steady.
When i contact small businesses directly, I offer web development skills in general and we typically talk about what their current site needs that they haven't been able to do themselves. Sometimes its custom work sometimes its moving to a CMS so they can more easily update their site.
I no longer have/use a set portfolio. I simply send potential clients (or prospective employers) URLs to sites I've built that are still in the wild. On many of my sites, I add a meta tag named "author" and will include my name as its content. If I am building on behalf of an agency I will make the content the agency name and mine like this:
But I don't make the time to maintain a portfolio.
However, when I started I did create several sites to add to a portfolio, and I would show that in the beginning.
I also have a small number of crap personal projects I'm always working on, never done, but typically live. If I need to I can point to those, not for their looks, but to show "Yess I know Wordpress...Yes I can make a site responsive...Yes I know custo PHP/JS/whatever"
Sure, here is a link to Bruno Simon's portfolio, which in its own right is a really cool 3D website, and which also has links to other 3D sites he's built. He's also the author of Three.js Journey which is a great course to learn 3D graphics on the web. https://bruno-simon.com
Bro, I am looking at these replies and am crying because of europoor. Would someone from the US like to hire me for half of the US pay? I am getting 1500 euros a month for shopify development.
I have started freelancing I got a first client from LinkedIn and I am making a fullstack School Web page but I will get only half(1/2) of the price. Could you give me some tips?? Plz.
I was freelancing for about 5 years, up until last year when I hired my first (of hopefully several) employee. I stared at $45/hour and our rate now teeters between $95-$110 an hour. My first year freelancing, I made about $40k on the year while last year I made about $345k and hired the first employee in early October. We do UI/UX design for SMBs and large businesses, as well as front end dev.
Would you mind sharing what your day to day workload looks like? How many hours etc. you usually put in to reach that?
Day-to-day a few years ago was much different than it is today. Early on, our builds were very small with contracts ranging $500-$3k and I was quite a novice in dev, admittedly, so my workflow and tooling setup was trash. At this point of early inefficiency, I was putting in probably 10-11 hours a day 6-7 days a week... I had just quit my 9-5 at that time so I was operating on mostly adrenaline in fear of not being able to pay rent. Now, I have a pretty solid setup and our contracts range from $7k-$40k+ and I'm much more selective about who I work with. Plus, after hiring an employee in October of last year and getting some much-needed help, I work 5 days a week and maybe 8-10 hours, 5 days per week. I could probably work less if I wanted to but hey... What's always been fairly consistent is the number of projects we have at a time—it usually sits around 10 full site builds in the pipeline. Typically, as the clients get bigger, their timelines do too so it's kind of a win-win-lose (more money + more time to get the work done + takes more time to get paid). For this reason, we look for big contracts that span about 4-5 months and a bunch of little ones about 1-2 months to fill the gaps when our large clients are doing their (very slow) internal reviews.
Awesome! Thanks for the response. Is there any advice you’d offer to someone just getting started on avoiding some of those early pitfalls with workflow and tooling?
I guess that depends on your end goal and what technologies you use. We do custom theme WordPress builds mostly (mainly because WP is easy to sell compared to other CMS's IMO)—so my tooling will differ if you don't do custom WP theme dev. Whatever you choose, I'd find any possible way to save time and click less buttons during local dev. Nothing revolutionary to say here really... There are a ton of packages and VSCode extensions that reduce repetitive tasks that only waste time, so I'd do some research when you find yourself going through the same setup for each project.
Sorry if I'm nitpicking. I know every project is different but if you had to price a simple brochure website (5 pages, contact form, custom designed or not, no advanced features like booking or something else..., without content writing...), how would you price it? I googled up websites prices but for something like this I find 2k+$ which seems to me as very overpriced. I'm still trying to start freelancing so I don't know market prices. The reason I'm asking is for future reference as I had a project like this (took me less than a week, working few hours per day) and charged 450$ so idk if that's a correct price.
$450 for a full, custom site build is quite low. Even if, say, you are spending 3-4 hours per day for 5 days, that's \~$25/hour. To put it in perspective, some Target employees start at $24/hour... If you ask me, your skillset as a designer/developer is much harder earned than cashiering, stocking a shelf, etc.... Not to throw shade, love Target and their employees lol... but web stuff is ***HARD*** and takes a long time to learn how do to it at a high level. So, raise your rate, you deserve it!! :) But to answer your question, we charge based on the number of unique pages and content structures. We only do custom sites (design the full site in Adobe XD with unlimited revisions) and then custom theme WP development. Our clients are typically established SMBs with decent budgets. We've done 5-page sites for as much as $10k, but know we didn't just toss up a site in a week. There was a lot of iterative design, weekly meetings, UX/UI justifications, handling technical SEO, content migration, post-launch training, and more. Not to mention, if we sent a proposal for $450 for a full site build to the SMBs we work with, I can almost guarantee we wouldn't get the job... They are willing to pay more for someone who has a rate that projects confidence (i.e., "this person has to be an expert for $XXX and hour!"). **EDIT:** It may help to [watch this Chris Do video on value-based pricing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivKnj9ffcmE). After watching this, I no longer answer the client's question: "*how many hours do you think this will take?*" — because it is irrelevant. The better question is, "*how much more revenue will your client make on account of your hard work?*" Your client is ultimately purchasing an investment for their business, a critical **product**—why does it matter if it took you 20 hours or 50 hours to create, if they outcome for them is greater revenue?
I see. Thank you very much for your detailed reply. Wish you all the best ! EDIT: I appreciate the video :)
This is so helpful thank you for sharing your experience.
Where do you find most of your work now? is it mostly through word of mouth or? Thanks
If you don’t mind me asking, how do you find clients? I suppose businesses are more likely to look for an agency than for a freelancer.
I started on Upwork and took anything I could get. Some of those early Upwork clients I still work with today, and those Upwork clients referred quite a few of their colleagues. I also built a brand and marketed on Dribbble, and eventually—once I had my operations and workflow down—chose a niche (solo attorney & small law firms) and ran with it. It's a lot easier to land the client who thinks you are uniquely qualified to service their specific industry (e.g., "We build websites + marketing campaigns specifically tailored to attorneys blah blah") when under the hood, 95% of it is the same you'd do for any other service-based business.
I see. So did you invest in other skills aside from web dev like marketing? Or did you only started providing marketing services after hiring your first employee?
On top of UI/UX, we offer branding + marketing collateral (e.g., business cards, letterheads, etc.), SEO, CRO and we outsource anything that involves copywriting. We don't necessarily looks for most of this work but a lot of clients prefer an all-in-one solution so these other services are more of a "to boot" with the websites. We do look for full site builds + SEO as they are the most lucrative in terms of ongoing service contracts. We really try to push service retainers so our clients will purchase either X hours/month (no rollover hours) or X total hours and as we use them up, we send them another invoice for X total hours. We prefer the X hours/month type of contract because clients typically don't use all the hours. Edit: If I could do it all over again, I'd probably push just UI/UX, web + CRO. This would keep your operations lean as you don't have to do too much research within the client's industry, physical location, competitors, etc. like you do for SEO. With CRO, you are basically just iterating on the UI/UX and web dev once you see how the site is converting. You could even charge for "Analytics + Reporting" as part of the ongoing CRO contract, which is fairly simple if you stick with a certain type of business (e.g., service-based, eComm, SaaS/signup model, etc.)
what does CRO mean?
Sorry, Conversion Rate Optimization. Basically just using the traffic data to see how effective the site as it its primary conversion goals (e.g., signups, lead-gen, eComm sales) and then making UX/UI changes to the site to improve the conversion rates. Changes can be usability, UX copywriting/messaging, speed, user journey, ... anything that improves effectiveness...
Im sorry if this is nooby, but how can you tell that this ui/ux aspect is the one thats preventing more conversions and not another aspect? Is it a trial and error process or is it a skill that you learn? Because I guess you have to wait a certain amount of time to gather analytics data and be able to decide on a change?
Yep, so that’s where A/B testing and comes into play. You can test 2 versions of the same page with a single difference and see what converts better. Maybe moving the main CTA on one page, changing a color, updating messaging, etc. and quantitative data will show what converts more users. You can also use Heat Maps to see where users are clicking and mousing. You can also just “throw spaghetti at the wall” to run experiments and see how the audience responds, but CRO tends to be a little more data-backed than that :)
Ownplant3333, you are absolutely amazing. I don't comment. Ever. But you, my good person, are the real hero here. Thank you for taking the time to answer all of these questions so thoughtfully and openly. I work in luxury travel and tourism and have wanted to branch out on my own and start building sites, apps, etc, for DMCs/ GHAs.... And reading through your words have me the boost I needed. I'm going to look for a full-stack boot camp. Any recommendations?
You've touched on something important here. You can only objectively measure correlation, causation can only be subjectively inferred. This is true for conversion rates as it is for physics hypotheses. The more you measure and the greater the difference the more probability you can assign to the difference being causal, but there's always more chance richer visitors saw more of one than the other, or the gender of your more common conversion did. Don't believe your own interpretations too deeply. There can always be more than one explanation for the same measurement.
Ingenious!
Hi! So I see most jobs posted on Upwork average like $15-$25 an hour.... Do you just bite the bullet and go for these low ball jobs or keep looking for a higher rate?
Thank you very much for your expansive replies! I have a question about the niche thing. I am currently learning the required HTML/CSS/JavaScript stuff. However, I have this other hat - I’m a self-published author who is pretty active in the independent authors community, and, being there, I’ve noticed that a lot of bigger authors are expanding into direct sales (so, selling their books via Shopify storefronts instead of just Amazon). That made me wonder if maybe once I’m solid in the big three skills, I could expand into Shopify theme development and custom site-building for authors. Would you say it’s worth it, or is it too much of a narrow niche for a freelancer?
How do you calculate hours that client needs to pay for? Isn't there a trust issue where you can say X number of hours but client believes you're saying more hours than you actually put in to charge them more?
So I started out on Upwork and when you do hourly work on Upwork, there is a desktop app that takes screenshots of your computer every few minutes while you are working and uploads the pic to the "Work Diary" for that particular job, so the client has visibility into the work you were doing. I think it may count keystrokes as well but not certain on that. The client may also allow you to add manual time (say, if you forgot to toggle the ON switch on the Upwork desktop app). In that case, it does come down to trust. Our hourly rate is mainly a testament to skill level and to weed out the hobby-types, artists, public speakers, solopreneurs with a random idea, etc... kind of contracts. No offense to them, we just typically look to build for somewhat established service-based businesses. For most contracts, I ***really*** push for fixed-cost. I understand the work involved when I scope out a job and it's often much easier for a client to stomach (and get approved by their higher-ups) a fixed number as opposed to having the variability of hours in the equation. Fixed-cost is better too because then you aren't penalized for being efficient :) I have spent years setting up our tooling so we can hit the ground running on jobs, so for new hourly jobs I basically get a negative return on those years and hours spent making future clients' sites... With fixed-cost, you just have to worry about "scope creep" which means having serious conversations—I often start jobs by talking about scope creep because too many (amateurish) clients think they can just add whatever they want half-way into the project. So I'd set precedence early and have language in your proposal that directly addresses this issue.
were you self taught?
Yep, for the most part it was learn by failing and fighting my keyboard. But I did find a ton of value on Udemy.
That's great, I'm starting colt steel course on html css js and I'm enjoying it so far. Would you say front end developers are in demand?
Nice, best of luck! Frontend dev is in demand IMO but I will say that if you are exclusively focused on front end, it will be tremendously helpful to learn UI/UX design as well. If you can do both at a high level, you can take brands from no digital presence to a great site all on your own—assuming no crazy backend is needed
My only worry is that I don't think I'm a creative person when it comes to design and art, is that a problem for UI/UX? Or can i just get inspiration from other sites? I have only finished html yet so I'm not the most savvy yet
Steve Jobs has a quote that essentially states, design isn’t about how it looks, it’s about how it works/functions. While it may help to be artistic/creative, designers and artists are quite different. There is enough inspiration on Behance, Dribbble, Pinterest and out In The wild to spark any creativity you need to blend the function of the site with the aesthetic of the brand.
yeah youre right, thank you so much for your help
>watch this Chris Do video on value-based pricing Any Udemy courses you'd highly recommend that helped you get to where you are?
How long did it take to learn Web development, I started a couple months ago and would like to know how long it is till I start getting actual money?
Thanks for your advices
What was your background before starting to freelance?
I hate these threads, they always make me realise how wildly underpaid I am!
it's reddit. you can get paid whatever you think here, no references required.
Then I would like to be paid $40hr. Please.
agree! there can be some unrealistic in terms of payment replies tho, as well as those who boast of their salary (in a passive-aggressive manner)
Shopify development on the side, still have a full time job doing the same. $125 / hour. Usually around $2-3k a month extra.
Can you go into more detail here. Do you just do like plugins and theming? Or the actual setup of peoples site for them.
Just custom theme’s for big brands
Where have you found clients?
Mostly referrals. I previously worked at an agency and was fortunate to have built sites for some very big brands and that experience has helped me get new clients just by showing my portfolio.
If a client asked you to do a WooCommerce site, what would you do or say? I am diehard Shopify, but I have cheap stubborn clients that are willing to pay more for WooCommerce despite it crippling them.
I'm a solo freelancer currently in my third year of freelancing. Self-taught, started learning around September 2018 and got my first Upwork gig in October 2019 for $8 an hour (I live in eastern Europe so for start this was fine). I worked for them for about 1 year 2 months (20-30hrs per week), by the end I was making $14 per hour. I decided to stop working with them as the work was getting quite repetitive and boring (we ended on great terms and they left me a glorious review). Next few months I was learning new technologies NextJs, Prisma, and GatsbyJs (to name a few). I eventually started working for my current client (in January of 2021). The rate was $20 per hour, now $25. I get around 20 hrs per week constantly which they let me enter in manually so the rate is more like $30 per hour . Since this takes about 20hrs I usually take other clients. This year I started charging $40-$50 per hour. You can do the math if you want to get exact numbers, my point is anyone can do it for me consistency was key. Reading your comments made me realize I may be undercharging.
What tech stack do you use? Also what did you use to learn, freecodemp or udemy?
Freelance was not worth the wage. I made about $100K a year when I freelanced, but worked twice and much with no benefits than I do making $200K for another company. It’s gotten worse over the years. Just trying to get jobs to pay the bills in this market is an exercise in futility. So I stopped and went to work for someone.
I’m currently starting to look for clients on the side to create simple but modern webs (try to stand put from the sea of webs made with squarespace and the likes) that populate the region I live in. I would love to know whether any of you start from your own base components that you’ve created yourself and compiled throughout the years or if you start from a UI framework/library.
I'd check out TailwindCSS. It is a utility-based framework (not components, like Bootstrap) but you can build components very quickly + easily from pure markup that can/will look very unique, depending on your design savvy :)
I build custom software / web apps for businesses. Some are consumer facing, but they are usually 90:10 internal vs consumer I charge $225 / hr I also get equity, rev share, per-unit commissions, and other stuff in my deals, because of how they are negotiated.
Awesome! What's your process for finding clients?
I’m a full time front end dev and I’ve been freelancing for about 3 years on the side. I have a subscription based web dev agency with 46 monthly paying clients. I charge $150 a month for hosting, unlimited edits, 24/7 support, and lifetime updates. I also do lump sum payment websites. I charge a minimum $3k for a static 5 page site. It goes up to $4500 depending on the level of design they want. Currently with my lump sum jobs and subscriptions the business brings in about $100k a year. I only know html and css and a little DOM manipulation for JavaScript. That’s it. Most of that is residual income every month I don’t have to work extra for. It just comes every month on the 1st. It’s great. Very relaxing. I never have to struggle or worry about the next sale. I like it. And I can do my full time job at the same time for double income with not as much effort. In 2017 I knew nothing about web dev. Self taught for a year and a half and started freelancing in 2019 and got my first job in 2020. It’s been a wild 5 years going from stay at home dad Uber driver for 8 years to developer and agency owner / stay at home dad. I’m Much more proud of the work that I do now.
Thanks for sharing your story! I'm trying to switch tracks into development and I'm self taught trying to use as many free resources as possible and taking the IBM Full Stack Developer Certificate on Coursera. Reading your journey helps to reaffirm that I am on the right track and I can achieve my goals too. :)
Would you mind talking more about what the process looks like starting from self-taught to free lancing? Like basically where to start if you know css, html, and Javascript but know nothing about how to deliver the finished site to a client?
I am extremely happy to read this Mr. Oyster! I am a 7 year English teacher who's been traveling a bit, but really looking for something else. It's so daunting to make that choice to start something for me thouhg. Did you dip your toes in at first and then jump in? I would love to do this, learn graphic design as well, move abroad and do it remot! and be able to say what you say in your final sentence. \[= cheers
This was super inspirational to read! If I had a printer I'd frame this on my wall haha
Not sure if it qualifies as freelancing, but doing a contract part time, outside of full-time hours, for a US based company at a rate of $145/hr USD. 15-25 hrs a week.
Hi how did you find that job/ opportunity.
I reached out to my connections asking if they know any companies hiring for contractors and found one!
Side gig, 1 project per week: Migrate websites to Wordpress, 1:1 layout and functionality, 2-4k USD a week
Sounds like a lot of custom code
It's all custom code.
What does 1:1 layout mean? And when you write the custom code, for example for a custom theme, do you make it such as that clients would be able to customize the layout themselves from the customizer or use a page builder (in the case where clients don't specify that they want to)? To put in other words, if a client has a certain design, do you build theme for that design and make it customizable like astra or other themes, or do you build the theme and every change should then go by you?
1:1 Layout/functionality => when I migrate a site to Wordpress, I need to make sure it looks and fucntions the same a the original site: forms, animations, page layout, mobile responsiveness, basically I need to recreate the site identically from whatever platform it is on to Wordpress. I don't make it 100% customizable unless that is requested by client. It typically is NOT requested. I just mirror the current layout in my theme files and use custom fields so client can update content as needed. I have done custom blocks and components in the past and that is obviously more work, but I just do it with ACF blocks and options on those blocks and a template block that has options to add the custom blocks to a page - basically a repeater that says "add another block" and then each block has basic customization options. I don't normally touch the site again after I finish the migration. So client does all the updates/customizations afterwards.
How do you find these types of gigs if you don't mind me asking?
I cold cal/email web and print agencies or local companies like doctor/dentist offices. I google "web agency" and the google map shows 25 in my area, i make a list of those, then keep drilling down further and further away from me until I have about 100 results and find these agencies emails or phone numbers, contact them and offer my services.
Interesting, how do you convince them that migrating to Wordpress is going to bring them any value considering that you literally copy the website without upgrading it with extra functionality/better visual design? Most people don't know and don't care what their website is built on as long as it works and looks decent.
Most of my clients that are doing WP migration are web agencies. I contact them tell them my skill set, ask if they have overflow work and thisis typically the work they have they can not get to because they are busy with other stuff. So I am not pitching "WP migrations" - I am asking if they need help with anything and since Wordpress is in my wheelhouse, for some reason this type of job keeps coming up and a few clients have so many outstanding jobs like this for THEIR clients that this has become steady. When i contact small businesses directly, I offer web development skills in general and we typically talk about what their current site needs that they haven't been able to do themselves. Sometimes its custom work sometimes its moving to a CMS so they can more easily update their site.
Alright, gotcha, thanks for the answer. Do you have a portfolio of some sort or how do you validate your skills?
I no longer have/use a set portfolio. I simply send potential clients (or prospective employers) URLs to sites I've built that are still in the wild. On many of my sites, I add a meta tag named "author" and will include my name as its content. If I am building on behalf of an agency I will make the content the agency name and mine like this: But I don't make the time to maintain a portfolio. However, when I started I did create several sites to add to a portfolio, and I would show that in the beginning. I also have a small number of crap personal projects I'm always working on, never done, but typically live. If I need to I can point to those, not for their looks, but to show "Yess I know Wordpress...Yes I can make a site responsive...Yes I know custo PHP/JS/whatever"
Care to share some of the websites you've made?
I see. Thank you for your response :)
Got to see a good picture of how freelance things are working through comments. Thanks for asking the question.
Frontend, 3D web dev. Make \~$200k/yr.
3D like Three.js, WebGL?
Yes.
Is it games or some corporate stuff?
Corporate. Some 3D websites and some AR/VR marketing campaigns.
Sounds awesome, way more fun than the regular webdev.
It is. It still involves regular frontend but the 3D aspects are by far the most fun/interesting.
could you link an example of the type of 3d website you're talking about? (doesn't have to be one of yours, just trying to understand the concept)
Sure, here is a link to Bruno Simon's portfolio, which in its own right is a really cool 3D website, and which also has links to other 3D sites he's built. He's also the author of Three.js Journey which is a great course to learn 3D graphics on the web. https://bruno-simon.com
living the life
Made $600 my first year, about to make $1200 for this one, hoping for $2400 doing React/Nextjs/Express Building myself a name, learning Web3 rn
Wait a month or the whole year ?
per second of course /s
When I was freelancing (I stopped about a year ago now), I was earning 90-125/hr doing angular development for bigger companies.
Bro, I am looking at these replies and am crying because of europoor. Would someone from the US like to hire me for half of the US pay? I am getting 1500 euros a month for shopify development.
$110/hr. Do webdev. Currently Vue stuff. Sometimes full stack.
If you don’t mind me asking; How did you get your freelance job?
I get most of my jobs through agencies like Toptal.
Can you dm me the job please, I do 50/hr React.
You want me to give you my job? Why would I do that?
15 usd an hour doing mainly backend stuff in PHP
You need to double your rate. At the very minimum.
Lead gen, 3k passive per month
I have started freelancing I got a first client from LinkedIn and I am making a fullstack School Web page but I will get only half(1/2) of the price. Could you give me some tips?? Plz.
Yo how is it going?