top | item 9116254

Ask HN: Best place to find high paying freelance projects?

17 points| Jamie452 | 11 years ago | reply

I'm employed full time but would like to find a high paying freelance project, to make some extra cash during March. I'm an experienced Full Stack Developer, with a 1st class honours degree in Web Application Development and about 8-10 years of non stop development experience (2-3 yrs industry, the rest my own projects).

I've tried sites like elance and peopleperhour but it always seems that developers from the Philippines, Russia, India etc will always be willing to work for less, thus out-bidding me.

I'm wondering where the best place is to get a decent gig if you're located in the UK like me? Where can I find freelance clients who want high quality code, rather than a cheaper outsourced product?

6 comments

[+] brudgers|11 years ago|reply

If a person is lucky, good freelancing work just falls in their lap. Ordinary humans, on the other hand, have to hunt well paying contracts down. Most of the work of freelancing is identifying good clients, being there when the client has work that can be handled by a contractor, and closing the deal successfully. The work itself is often the easy part.

Developing leads means making contact with many busy people. Those people need to be busy with work that pays well enough that they can pay you well. A good source of that sort of work is well established contractors/freelancers/consultants/agencies because they take projects that pay well and this means there is likely to be meat on the bone when they use outside workers. The will take on outside help when they have more work than they can handle, and good consultants often do.

The rest of the world of freelancers is racing toward the bottom in pursuit of clients who want to pay zero dollars.

Good luck.

[+] ryduh|11 years ago|reply

The best place is probably going to be your existing network. You know, the people that know your work ethic and the quality of your work. Past employers and past co-workers have contributed a big chunk of my projects.

[+] helen842000|11 years ago|reply

What about http://letsworkshop.com - they have a minimum budget in place so that cuts out the low end immediately.

[+] Jamie452|11 years ago|reply

I had a look and they sent me some leads pretty quickly, annoyingly the majority were technologies I don't have experience with or were for designers. Do you know if theres any way of filtering out what doesn't suit your skill set?