How do you freelance?

Hello all,

My name is Nathan Coumbe, and I am somewhat new to the Code Academy family. I went through the coding foundations path, I work as a Creative at Apple where I teach others the language of Swift coding, and have recently started the Web Development path and am loving learning HTML and CSS.

I have been thinking about doing this as a possible career change and was wondering what some of you all did to start out as web developers? My wife needs a website, so I thought I would practice by building one for her; I also have a friend who is a photographer who is need of a website and offered to build one for him if he would be a guinea pig for me practice.

How do you guys that freelance charge your customers (for future reference)? Do you charge a lump sum, do you base it on something specific, or do you set up a monthly fee that your customers must pay you to keep the website up to snuff? Any ideas or experience that you all have would be greatly appreciated.

Looking forward to hearing back from all of you.

  • Nathan
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Why freelance? Would be tough to beat apples pay right away. (I think it’s 11-30 per hour for creatives)

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There are two kinds of freelancers…

  1. Those who do work for free for those who cannot pay

  2. Those who work for someone who knows their work is not for free

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I make closer to the lower end of that spectrum and am also not enjoying what I am doing at my store anymore. This is a potential career change for me.

I am also trying to work freelance. I had a freelance contract job / client that was full time which was nice so I’m hoping to find another client like that. I am trying freelancer.com and upwork.com but it seems like it will take a lot of bidding and a long while to build up clients. I really only like the remote aspect of it though so I’m looking for regular jobs that are remote as well. I wish you all the best with your journey friend.

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Super sorry I have taken so long to reply, I don’t recommend Freelance, but that’s just my personal opinion.

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What about Fiverr.com ?? I think that is good to start. Is’t it?

Fiverr has an already super-saturated market.

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Then what would be other options? Upwork is also super saturated. And these are the best sites with best clients I guess.

In large metro markets like the one I live in you can find local clients. But for rural areas you’ll have to do the Fiverr or upwirk for super cheap

Hi Nathan (and other aspiring freelancers),
I am also hoping to work remotely but still have miles to go getting my skillset there. I have been researching about working freelance though and came across an interesting video. It’s called ‘Freelancing as a web devoloper’ and is by some producaer called traversy media on Youtube. Anyway in this video there is a list of bidding type sites which I’ll list here. I have no clue as to how good (or bad) they are:
Upwork
Elance
Toptail
Freelancer
Guru
GetAcoder
iFreelance
Project4hire
SimplyHired
Fiverr
StudentFreelance
Craigslist
Github
Stackoverflow
Indeed
Career builder
Dice
Glassdoor
Linkup
Monster
US Jobs

Well I’m planning to hopefully get some clients for next to nothing just to build my profile and reputation a bit. Also I saw some people just build and sell Wix pages (does this need any coding or is it just design!?!).
Well good luck and let me know how you are doing

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