Agency - i tried, so far it didn't work. I haven't found a single client who wanted me as an agency. I think it works differently from freelancer sales: you pitch to totally different people in different situations. My Upwork study also included a separate study of agency success, and it was overwhelmingly negative, there are very, very few successful agencies on Upwork, looks like whole agency thing doesn't work there. Of those not in India/Pakistan and thus working for $10/h (something clearly impossible in my case), there is just 1 really successful one, visibly making >$1M a year: https://www.polcode.com/en/ and a few others making $200-$500K a year, but i seriously don't want to go from 1 person business to 20 person business for 2x raise or 200 person business for 5x raise. And i don't believe i can pull it off. This is something completely unrelated to what i do now, i'd be as good trying to switch careers into an opera singer.