Ask HN: Is freelance web development still a viable path in 2019?

[MathCodeLove]

With the advent of wix, squarespace, and other code free forms of website developement, it seems as if the demand for custom built sites are at an all time low.

The little demand left is shared among a seemingly never ending hord of aspiring freelance developers, many of whom are willing to work at prices far below that of what their skills had once demanded.

With a market such as this what place, if any, is there for new developers who wish to break into freelancing? Is there any hope at all for these developers? Or have the days of freelancing been put to an end by abstraction and oversaturation?

[CareyB]

Not really. Wix and GoDaddy clobbered it, and now there are others. At one point I had over 30 sites requiring regular maintenance, and upgrades. Plus a few I developed, installed on other servers, and did not maintain. Now I’m down to about four. These days there’s almost always someone in a small business’ office with the requisite skills to do basic upgrades, and small changes. I get called when things go wrong, or there’s a major overhaul in the offing. Many small businesses do quite well with a Facebook page, or some other self development tool. The sites look amateurish, and derivative, but they get the job done. All you want is the ‘Who, what, where, when, and why’, and standards are so low there’s no functional penalty for having a lame Web presence. I find more clients hiring full time ‘social media’ specialists rather than me. I have pondered becoming a ‘social media expert’, but the fact that I have worked building some of the early experiments taints me against the concept.

Almost all Web sites are similar these days, and there’s a value to designing the UI/UX in a way users expect. I suggest that, for startups, and small businesses, there’s virtually no need for anything other than a basic Web presence. With the rise of social media, the appropriate account(s) will solve that problem for most.

I worked through the wild west of this industry, and it was semi-fun, but I think we’ve moved on, things have settled down, or are settling down, and there’s a minimum sufficient requirement for a Web presence that’s pretty freakin’ minimal.

[mxuribe]

100% THIS!

To your point about "becoming a social media expert", I actually began lightly dabbling in this, and felt nauseous after some time...Allow me to describe:

You begin admirably trying to help a business (or individual) to gain legitimate views and insights from their audience...but hoping to grow to full, positive engagements, and so forth - not for merely having a social media presence, but rather, with the overarching goal of growing their business, or meeting some other business goal of theirs...and eventually, they begin to get addicted, and whether its a true value to their business goals or not, they begin chasing the dragon of growth. And, much like i can only imagine like drugs - they get hooked. Whatever ethical advice i would provide is ignored, and they only want advice on how to grow their audience like crazy (think: hockey stick growth numbers, etc.) including employing fake follow bot accounts, etc. Their "chase" for ever more audience continues on a darker route...wanting ever more clicks/likes/views/attention - even at the risk of their business' main value proposition. They begin outright ignoring your continuous protests. You begin to feel sick - as if somehow you are the gun salesperson selling a gun to a person you are only now discovering is dangerous. Your client keeps pushing you for more and more dark patterns to employ, and you continue to refuse...ultimately ending the business relationship.

Now...are all clients like what i noted above? No, i'm sure there are good clients out there that don't go dark...But for me, I kept encountering the dark ones. So, for what its worth, I would not go down the route of being a social media expert. Good luck, and cheers!

[usgroup]

I’d contend this. Just spoke to a mate last week turning £250k at a 50% margin doing nothing but websites and SEO for B2B clients.

Websites need design, visual assets, integrations, customised features, etc. It’s definitely a volume trade: you need to primarily be concerned with new biz, but it’ll be viable for a long time to come if you know what you’re doing .

[elorant]

Going down the social media expert path with a web development background can be very lucrative. 95% of the work done can be automated and the competition is primarily marketing guys who can't code shit. I've been literally shocked when I realized what most shops charge to handle social media accounts for their clients considering the amount of work done, which basically is a few minutes per day.

[tambourine_man]

Do you mind sharing what will you do next then?

[savrajsingh]

It's amazing that its taken over 20 years for other players to actually take this space over. Given how fast we move in tech it's surprising that it's taken so long and there's so much room for so many players (wix, squarespace, godaddy, etc etc)

[tmaly]

I wonder to what degree helping to setup an email newsletter and maintaining it would go hand in hand with the social media side?

[KingFelix]

I agree, What are you working on now?

[andy_adams]

I've been freelancing for 7 years, and the market has never been better for reliable web developers. A knowledgeable full-stack dev can earn above SV-level salary as a remote freelancer.

However, if you're marketing yourself purely as a "web developer", you're already commoditizing your skills. Instead, become an expert in a specific type of business/client and sell your ability to solve problems in that business domain. Your clients should not care about the tech you're using. You need to instead be seen as the expert who solves their problems with tech.

If you go this route, not only is freelancing viable - I think it's the best way to maximize your earnings as a developer.

I wrote about freelancing in more detail if you're interested: https://andyadams.org/everything-i-know-about-freelancing/

[lintuxvi]

This is right. "Building websites" is what all the low-priced developers do. Differentiate yourself, be reliable, and solve real business problems with code.

[cutler]

Just curious, do you find the websites of small/medium-sized businesses are predominantly PHP/Rails/Django or are you seeing ASP.Net and Java? The reason I ask is because if you market yourself as simply a problem-solver you'll need to be proficient in a wide range of programming languages.

[err4nt]

I say yes, it is viable, and I'll explain!

Different clients will value your skills differently. If you can fix a website and that creates 10% more sales revenue, somebody making $2,000 can only afford to compensate you $200 or else they're losing money. But the same skills and labour to a client making $2,000,000 represents $200,000 of value. If you want to make money, you have to work for the people who value your time, skills, and labour _more_.

So with that in mind, here's my secret: the profile of a profitable freelance client. This has been from my experience, and I've made money from clients that don't fit this profile too, but in general this is what making money in freelance looks like now:

- US-based small to medium sized business

- that is already profitable and making money via their website

- that is an organization still small enough you can speak directly to the owner or a key decision-maker

This is the kind of client who:

- has money to pay you

- values your skills

I think too many freelance clients think that because they are a small business, they must work for like-sized businesses, but tiny businesses simply don't have the money to value what you do enough to compensate you. A profitable company that's already making money from their website is precisely who will value what you have to offer more!

[kijin]

This is absolutely true. There's no money in building new websites. Instead, solve problems for people who already have well-established websites (read: a steady revenue stream) and want to go further.

The client doesn't even need to be a business that's larger than your own, as long as they have lots of money. There are websites out there that are run by literally one person and get tens of millions of page views per day. Be the engineer who can solve his scalability problems, and he'll throw at you whatever money you ask for.

I've also found professional associations to be well-paying clients. They're too busy making money in their own professions, if they encounter an IT problem, they'll pay anything to make it go away.

If you go down this path, though, be prepared to read and endless stream of legacy code, write compatibility layers, do live data migrations, and spend a lot of time in general trying to untangle other people's spaghetti PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. It's an established website, after all. You're not there to rewrite it in your favorite framework. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I face so little competition ;)

[cutler]

How do you profile such a company's revenue stream/profitability without inside information?

[tsp]

I am working as a freelance front-end developer in Germany since half a year. Some things I learned on the way:

Building websites for individuals (personal portfolios), non-commercial clubs and small scale businesses like barber shops or restaurants is a pain. You have to compete with website builders like Squarespace and pre-made templates for Wordpress. The amount of work needed to create one of these is way too expensive for most customers. There is still a demand for people settings these sites up (using a pre-made template), installing updates and so on, but I would hardly call this front-end development.

As @bnt said already: The market for JavaScript developers is booming. If you learn Angular, React or Vue.js, I am pretty sure you will not regret it.

If you present yourself in a good way on Linkedin, you will be flooded with requests from recruiters.

I would go with React, because there are the most jobs waiting for you. The market is huge!

[H1Supreme]

> Building websites for individuals (personal portfolios), non-commercial clubs and small scale businesses like barber shops or restaurants is a pain

I used to do a decent amount of this work, and I couldn't agree more. Outside of something I'm going to do Pro bono, I turn down requests altogether. Generally speaking, the budgets are nearly non-existent. And, you end up fighting with clients about small details that don't matter.

[locklock]

How did you get into freelancing, specifically in Germany? Do you get most work from Linkedin? I really don't like that site for various reasons but if it's necessary for freelance work I might have to sign up...

[IggleSniggle]

For whatever reasons, at least in my market (East Coast USA), Angular seems to be the framework of high paying salaried work.

My suspicion is there are two things driving this: Angular is More Enterprisy™, and the businesses that have committed to Angular have a slightly smaller pool of experienced Angular devs to draw from, increasing dev negotiating power. I expect that to continue for as long as Angular can hold a significant enough threshold of the market, but regardless, longer term, I expect React to be the new jQuery (essential for most web devs to know).

[katzgrau]

For small businesses, not really. The site generators have won there. Bigger budgets are few and far between and its tough to convince anyone that they need a maintenance contract - billable hours are always met with pushback. And I find that budget size is inversely proportional to how big of a pain in the ass a client is going to be.

For established businesses in healthcare, accounting, legal, and many other non-obvious, absolutely. A law firm might pay 100k for a simple website because they both have the budget and want to be absolutely sure they're paying for quality.

So if you target the right clientele and position your freelance business well (look established and not like there's a chance you could be out of business tomorrow), it's absolutely viable.

[arichard123]

I have drawn a graph to explain what I think has been happening since 2006 when I started freelancing. https://www.dropbox.com/s/i79fv0brlkvc79c/the-graph.png?dl=0

The x axis is "complexity of website" and the y axis varies. For the red line that slopes from top left down to bottom the y axis is "demand for website". The blue line is "Cost of website produced by web developer". Everything to the left of the vertical green line has a tool (wix, squarespace, wordpress etc) that makes it easy to produce that type of website. And over time that green line moves along the x-axis complexity scale. But the green line will only go so far, because you can't justify handling increasing complexity with a decreasing demand indefinitely.

Also, at some point it becomes easier to hire a web dev to make you a custom ecommerce solution, than to search through the 500 ecommerce solutions to find the one you want, when what you want is weird.

My strategy since 2006 has been to stay to the right of the green line, but not too far. My experience is that clients I've had on the right side of that line are still clients, and those who were not, have moved on.

I think there's a lot of legs left in that strategy. Finding a client who is on the right hand side of the line often means starting with some kind of integration work they are struggling with, or updating a legacy web app, which is always a pain. Or doing something weird. But once you've got through that successfully you're established as a meaningful cog in their corporate machine.

Interestingly, I drew the graph in 2006, and wix was founded that year, and was one of the examples I used at that time, so it's funny to see it still being mentioned now.

The strategy has given me a varied set of problems, I've worked on custom ecommerce solutions, funding application and claim management systems, CPD management, eLearning tools, and other more mundane things.

I've earned more each year I've been doing this, and it jumped up a couple of years ago, so it's still working well for me.

[YeahSureWhyNot]

"at some point it becomes easier to hire a web dev to make you a custom ecommerce solution, than to search through the 500 ecommerce solutions to find the one you want" I can't agree more. ecommerce solutions space is so crowded its hard to tell difference between them. Every one says they are the best and after having developed an ecommerce system for wholesale businesses we are having hard time getting the message across. I wish there was a giant matrix with all e-commerce solutions with their pros and cons listed for potential clients to get a better idea what is best for their situation

[la_barba]

Hmm, but for a one-two person freelancing gig, how complex of a site can you realistically build though? How much time do you spend on marketing & sales vs actual development?

[codegeek]

There are 2 things:

1. Commoditized website development where any tom dick and harry can setup a quick website on wix/squarespace etc because frankly, they don't need more than that. It is really hard to compete against tools like these because they sell $2/Year websites (or something low enough)

2. There are businesses (small-mid sized) that have built something way back (read:late 90s-early 2000s) who are struggling with their in-house system and looking for a better solution. But they are too scared to think about changing because they don't know who to talk to and what it will cost. You need to find those businesses.

Source: My company finds the #2 and it is a gold mine.

[justaguyhere]

How do you find customers for #2 though?

[pragmaticlurker]

for the 1., it depends on the quality you want to achieve.

A business that relies on those platforms can't be called business.

[willhallonline]

As someone who has been a freelancer and ran a web development company for a time (now I work in DevOps), I would suggest that the market for web development as a freelancer is limited. Honestly, I think that you would spend most of your time picking up clients, who regularly will not want to pay the rates that would cover your costs, let alone allow you to make a profit.

However, contracting seems as strong as it ever has done, especially in areas like Javascript and Python development. I would opt for contracting rather than freelancing, especially if you are able to get remote contracts.

I know lots of people who do make a living from web development, but they are largely within medium sized companies that have a marketing/sales budget and are able to cope with multiple large contracts simultaneously.

[whamlastxmas]

Strongly no. Overseas workers will work for tremendously less and it's hard enough to get people to understand your value proposition in person. People want cheap. Either start an agency and get real clients, often local, or just get a full time job.

Even with the big projects I've gotten, it winds up being about $20/hour. Versus about $60/hour at a regular job

[potta_coffee]

Most of my work comes from companies who have gotten burned by overseas developers and want someone closer to home who they can meet personally and will be in the same or at least mostly overlapping timezone. So yes, in the US you can't compete on price but you can compete on service.

[seisvelas]

As a developer in Mexico, I can confirm. You aren't going to beat us on price alone

[nathan-io]

The money isn't in the website, it's in the related services.

If you're targeting SMBs, you can almost treat the actual site design/dev as a loss leader.

Offer comprehensive packages that guarantee you long-term recurring monthly revenue, rather than a just a one-off "website development" service.

For an example, a "premium" hosting/management service is an easy sell.

* "Your own virtual private server with dedicated IP address and hardware resources"

* "Uptime monitoring" (automated/free)

* "Site & Server Security" (one-time hardening of your CMS and/or any other attack vectors + apt update / apt upgrade every couple weeks)

* "DNS Management" (create or change some DNS record every few months, if ever)

* "Site backup and restoration" (one click on Digital Ocean and many other providers), etc.

* "x free hours per month of updates, no rollover" (will often go unused)

My agency has SMB clients paying up to $250/mo for hosting/management alone (actual cost: $10-15 per client).

Easy money.

Next, we have SEM and local SEO (citation building/management and reputation monitoring).

The beauty of these services is that they're relatively easy to scale and/or outsource to some white label provider. In the case of local SEO, tools like BrightLocal basically do all the work.

Even if you don't want to take this route, you can still differentiate with strong backend development skills.

For example, we secured one contract because we offered a creative solution to integrate the website with the client's legacy on-premise CRM (which has no API), which no one else had the first clue how to do because there isn't a WordPress plugin for that (slight sarcasm).

[codingdave]

I've gotten freelance projects from small local businesses, but not for building the sites. After the sites are built, people need help solving the problems that come next.

As an example, almost every local doctor's office in my town wants online request forms that auto-populate their internal calendaring app. They all get emails coming in, and have manual processes to move the emailed data into another app. OK, I can help with that. Other times, they have functional web sites but want help with making them convert more business. So it gets into discussions about the design, the copy, calls to actions, etc. And sometimes, they simply don't understand what a web site can do for their business - they slap up a brochure and call it good, then wonder why it isn't helping their business.

So you end up being more of a business consultant to understand what they are trying to accomplish, and then applying technology to make it happen.

[cubano]

For sure it is. In fact, it's as good as it's ever been.

One caveat though...you gotta know your shit. The days of babysitting websites and charging fairly outrageous fees are mostly over, and good riddance.

I've found that true LAMP or MEAN-full stack dev is really in demand now...so much so that I recently raised my hourly to a once-only-dreamed-about $100/hr US on Upwork, and I'm getting more interest in my services by the day.

Sometimes I actually have to pinch myself to believe this work environment is real...I often tell my friends, as sincerely as possible and with true humility, that I work in an absolute dream world that, up to now, only Rock Stars inhabited.

I mean...who else gets to work their own hours?...do whatever I really want while working?...travel the country/hemisphere on a whim?...goto music festivals and get paid while doing so?...live on the beach one month and on a mountain top another?

Well..I do. And man, am I grateful.

[Leggomyeggolas]

I mean...........yeah. I make $125/hr consulting doing a mix of front end and back end web development. The market is really strong for that. Maybe not for glorified brochure sites, but when it comes to actual web app development the market is super strong.

[nullandvoid]

We are in a constant struggle to fill front end web developer roles in every place I've worked at in the UK.

Seems to be a real shortage of quality developers And we offer competitive rates at my current place of work

[usx]

If you're hiring, I'm currently on the market. FE working faily with Vue.js for the past year and a half in my current company. I live in London and would gladly chat more about what you may be looking for.

[szggzs27]

without going into too much details, what is competitive rate for a FE web dev?

I work in London and was just wondering what those rates go for.

[akmarinov]

But do you offer remote work?

There’s plenty of need for developers, yet almost no companies consider remote positions.

[nickelcitymario]

Yes, but the honest money is at the higher end of the market.

At the smaller scale (think $2k budgets), clients are honestly better off with a Wordpress template. I never recommend Wix or Squarespace because the code is usually atrocious, which impacts mobile and SEO and accessibility, but there are lots of excellent WP templates.

Clients who have bigger budgets can now look at things like:

- Honest to goodness great copywriting. If the purpose of their website is to sell their products and services, great copywriting is the easiest way to improve. It's inexpensive compared to everything else, it's super fast and easy to test ideas and optimize results.

- E-Commerce. This is usually best served with a service like Shopify, but it's still relatively involved enough that clients tend to like having some assistance in the process.

- Uniquely good design. Design CAN have a tremendous impact on a business. But I list it in 3rd here because the vast majority of web designers are putting out the same site[1] over and over again. If you're not doing something truly unique, or if the client's needs are best solved with a relatively standard template, then why are you re-inventing the wheel?

- Engineering. Virtually any business can benefit from good web engineering, because the out-of-the-box options will never 100% meet any businesses precise needs. However, the cost versus benefit is usually far too high for most businesses.

This is why I say the money is at the higher end of the market. Businesses that have annual revenue in the double digit millions will not be well served by default Wix or Wordpress templates. They generally need quality design, copy, and engineering. And they won't be scared off if that ends up costing $50k or $100k or even $500k, so long as the value is there.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can make some quick-hit money helping clients who simply don't want to do it themselves. I tend to charge roughly $3k for a simple site, I'm 100% transparent about what they're getting (a template, customized for branding; out-of-the-box WP functionality; very light copy editing), and so far a lot of smaller businesses have been happy with that service. The value is there for them, and they get the confidence of knowing I'll solve any unforeseen problems that might come up.

[1] Ex: https://www.dagusa.com/

[bluetidepro]

> I never recommend Wix or Squarespace because the code is usually atrocious, which impacts mobile and SEO and accessibility, but there are lots of excellent WP templates.

I can't vouch for Wix, but the code in Squarespace is actually usually very well done and semantic for most themes. And honestly, they can end up being just as bad or good as any WP template you'll find, so I wouldn't personally just throw that accusation around.

[ficklepickle]

I freelanced to gain experience. Most businesses would rather not mess around with Wix, but they also don't want to pay thousands.

Find a small business with a crappy website and make them a better one. I mostly did restaurants/bars. I took partial payment in food.

If you are in it for the money, then no, it is not worth it. If you are in it for experience and to progress in your career, then go for it!

Obviously, I can't guarantee it will work for you, too. But it worked for me. I recently landed my first contract with a start-up, and I should never have to go back to taking partial payment in food :-)

[nness]

Development expertise in enterprise tech is incredibly lucrative for freelancing/contractors. The day-rate for an on-shore AEM Developer gives me a small heart-attack.

[EnderMB]

Everyone I've ever met that earns big money writing software has worked with legacy or enterprise tech.

AEM and Salesforce developers make a ton of money, especially if they are good. Contract Sitecore developers also make a ton of money, and never seem to be short of work.

The scariest money I've seen was from a guy that is/was an "ActionScript developer". He made most of his money travelling across the country to work on maintaining and extensing retail systems that used Flash as an interface, and ActionScript for backend logic. He was working for a client of my employer, and we got to chatting when we were in the city for a few days. I didn't get an overall figure, but he'd made £10k that week...

It didn't sound like he enjoyed the work, but most of his skill set was actively around legacy tech - ColdFusion, Cobol, Classic ASP, etc.

[chasd00]

i agree, find some enterprise-y software and learn it well and then go out and contract/free-lance to large companies and consulting firms. If there's a certification for your system of choice pick it up. It may seem worthless to you but to the people who have to get budgets approved resources with certifications are a golden ticket.

[onemoresoop]

Whats AEM?

[filesystemdude]

Totally freelance? Not sure. Small teams doing custom site development? Absolutely.

I've seen large companies pay six figures to stand up a microsite, the kind of thing that one person could easily put together in a few weeks.

The catch is that you don't necessarily have a few weeks, you have a few days to go from concept exploration to go-live. It really becomes more about project management than web development in these instances, having a network who you can turn to quickly when you need more hands on deck.

And though I hate the phrase "full-stack" because it means so many things that it sometimes seems like it means nothing, they do really expect a well-rounded technologist.

I'm working with a consultant right now on a web project for my employer. I talked to him yesterday about IE11 fallbacks for Flexbox, proxy setup, CDN configuration, logging and metrics, debugging a custom legacy spaghetti-coded marketing-tech JavaScript, modifying a Drupal PHP module to support project-specific requirements, configuring cron, and a handful of other things, and I fully expect when I talk to him today he's going to have all of those tasks finished.

Those people are invaluable. Someone who can write a little HTML and CSS and maybe stand up WordPress? I'm sure there are jobs for that, but I don't have any need to hire them as a freelancer because I expect everyone on our staff to have those abilities.

That said, doing freelance web dev is _exactly_ how I got my foot in the door with the job I have now. But it paid squat for the time I was doing it, and I hated it because my time ended up being 50%+ of the time running the business side of things instead of building website, which is the part I actually enjoyed.

[NoblePublius]

I run a digital development agency specializing in mobile apps. For the last three years, the web app portion of my business has doubled each year. There remains extreme demand for front end web developers though the basic projects for restaurants and doctors’ offices are now owned by Squarespacr and Wix

[cutler]

What is the profile of a typical client in the market for such an app by which I assume you mean one built with React, Angular or Vue?

[biznickman]

Yes! However if you bill yourself as a "freelance web developer" you have instantly commoditized yourself. The only problem you are solving is someone who's thinking to themselves "man I could really use a developer". This is a lot of people who on average have small budgets.

If you package yourself properly (for example, "I help founders take their startup idea from dream to reality"), you have now placed yourself in a new, more valuable, bucket. You have to hunt for the proper client fit but your offering is of greater value (in this circumstance you make dreams a reality).

Granted, entrepreneurs aren't the best market but the key is having some differentiator in your market and not offering a commodity service (which is what Wix, Squarespace, and frankly "web development" is).