Ask HN: How much are you earning as a freelance app developer?

I'm 25, I have a degree in Economics and Finance, and no formal computer education. All I have is my self-taught experience.

The first time I tried, for all my confidence, I flunked it really bad, which came as a shock to me. I mean, I knew I was good. The recruiter gave me a timeout and said I could reapply later. The next time I'd studied my butt off, solved advanced level coding exercises and reached 4 Kyu on codewars.com

At that point, I breezed through the exercises, and when I was asked to build a live project, I had fun learning and creating my first React web app.. I'd been meaning to learn React, but never had time before.

Of the dozens (dozens!) of people I've referred to Toptal none have passed the screening process. However, I strongly believe it's because they didn't push through it. I know the screening process itself can be beat if you take the time to improve yourself.

Besides, on the other side of the screening process is the greatest community of Ninja developers I've ever seen in my life! Anything I have trouble with, I can discuss on our community chat. I've never been part of a community like this before. And the clients are absolutely brilliant, since Toptal screens clients too!

Had I been a Java/Spring dev, I would've used that. It's what YOU do that matters.

Toptal let's you decide your hourly rate. $500/hour is awful in the sense that it's too darn high! :)

You're welcome to set whatever rate you think your time is worth, ofcourse!

> Are they charging more because of overhead?

Partially. There's overhead you wouldn't get with a single developer like office space and administrative overhead. A big overlooked piece of overhead is sales overhead. It's much easier to find 40 hours of consulting work a week than 120 hours of work. If its a premium development shop, the developer salaries are probably higher as well. This all may cut into the margins, but it doesn't really explain why they charge so much.

> Why do they charge so much?

Because they have clients who are willing to pay that much. Plain and simple.

> What does the client get that they wouldn't with a single developer?

Some companies are bad at finding and retaining talent. This includes contractors. They also might not know how to manage a project. For a lot of companies, they need something done, but this simply isn't their area of expertise. Some single developers can manage their own projects, but sometimes they need more than just a single developer. The workload may be much higher than what a single person could manage, and hiring 3 individual developers can be much less efficient than hiring a team of 3 developers who already work well together. Perhaps they need a designer as well, or they're looking for a project manager who is really good at communicating business needs with them.

2. My customers have the expectation of confidentiality. I will make these generalizable statements though: understanding ORMs and understanding SQL are related but not identical; CAP is hard; picking keys is hard; confounding your data model and your interface is painful for users; sharding is hard; pick UX libraries based on how consistent they are not on how new they are; developers that are producing 10x the code may not be producing 10x the value; if week on week, your project is consistently n/n+1 * 100% done, you have a estimation problem and just the fact that you're agile doesn't help with this; the whole point of tags was that not everyone agrees on categories; queuing theory is real; your spreadsheets aren't as consistent as you think; the fact that an engineer can figure out the bigO of a sort doesn't mean they understand efficiency in real life.

You'll be fine if you can produce, but if you can only produce on the week level and not the day level, you'll have troubles with companies that want to talk about the progress you're making day to day.

This was while I was working as a utility programmer and going to grad school.

While it never panned out for a number of reasons, it did get me introduced to the world of prototyping and I never looked back.

There have certainly been times of instability and there is no one there to lend a hand most times which can be intimidating.

One thing I try to do to get past the anxiety is make a new personal project when things get rough. So far it's worked out that those projects often lead to new opportunities and skills.

Being able to write the device, server and web client myself allows me to build concepts rapidly.

Instead of considering projects as clients, I look for collaboration efforts where there is a path to equity. Regardless it almost always begins as some sort of contract for an initial trial collaboration.

I saw toptal mentioned in another comment, and their "Why 3%" page is quite unnerving. I don't work at Wharton, MIT, CERN, or Google, and I'm not a Top 100 Django or Rails contributor. Or is this just the 3% of the 3%, and the remaining 97% are more mortal?

Of course it also helped to have the relevant experience/portfolio. I also prototyped a few wireframes (1 user flow) for free which gave me a leg up because he knew what I had in mind regarding the project.