Compared to what they could make at a FAANG? Probably no. Compared to developer salaries in the EU: A huge amount of money.

A discussion about the pay from last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116460

Remember that for freelancers in the US you've typically got like 40% overhead on your income, since you have to pay full tax on it and then you need to pay for your own health insurance and dental insurance.

So after that they've got 6-7k a month. Rent in many areas is 2000-3000/mo, so if they ended up previously settling down in an area like that (perhaps because they worked for a tech company or startup), I can understand feeling slightly squeezed. You can certainly live comfortably on 6k/mo as a freelancer but if you're the primary earner for a family it's probably going to make you nervous.

Freelancers also have to worry about gaps between payment, and funders/clients paying late. During my freelancing years I had some clients pay me $11k/mo and other clients just Not Pay me upwards of $5000, so even though I was "making" 11k/mo optimally, I ended up almost evicted after two clients opted not to pay me back to back. It makes a lot of sense to feel like your situation is precarious if you can only save up 1-2k a month, because your nest egg isn't growing super fast and your income may dry up without warning. It's not like having a salaried job as a high performer where the only real risk to worry about is layoffs.

For a full time developer’s salary? No. That is bout 1/3 to 2/3 the salary I’d expect for that job, depending on which U.S. market.

Initially I thought that also, but $130k a year isn’t very competitive for a skilled US-based software engineer if you consider the entire market.

Now for working on an open-source project it does seem pretty good.