A reality that most people are not ready to accept, is that if you work too hard or work too smart as a freelancer, you're going to hurt yourself financially.

I have given my clients amazing code which runs fast, is optimised, and is readable to the point where you can hire a fresher to maintain it.

Doing that has resulted in stable systems but those clients walked away from me and have never come back, means no more money.

But some of the companies I have worked for, I have seen some retarded-ass devs barely able to make a system run and write code, have retained clients for years. They pretty much have a "submit ticket resolve ticket" kinda mechanism.

It's situations like these where it makes me question, what's the point of learning best practices if I'm gonna get hurt financially for it.

Maybe you can change the contract? Just like the large companies do with their SaaS-crap.

Easy. Exploit the shit out of companies that think they'll save bucks with terrible devs.

I know I do. First time clients get the regular rate, and get more or less quality depending on their budget.

Then I offer maintenance deals, which are paid monthly at a greatly reduced rate, and that entitles them for x hours/mo of routine tasks.

Should they refuse, and place their cheapass devs to it, only to proceed to botch it all, when they come back to me it's gonna be 10x the price.

I now have 4 maintenance contracts and could live by just off those.

If you're that good, seek higher positions. If you find the right company, they'll appreciate your talent. Different companies have different needs, and sometimes a barely working solution is good enough for them. Not all companies are like that.

Some companies have $100k/minute downtime penalties, and they can benefit from the kind of code you write.

@CoreFusionX "Then I offer maintenance deals, which are paid monthly at a greatly reduced rate, and that entitles them for x hours/mo of routine tasks."

Old boss's side-hustle was pool company software. His spin was to do *anything* the client asked for, knowing well it wouldn't work or cause problems in the future. Every new feature would be $xxx and removing that feature would be $xxx.

Told me his best year was around $70,000.

Each field office could request (and pay for) features and two offices had conflicting requirements. Each release, one office would call "We need you to change it back, we'll pay for it", boss would change the code, release, the other office would call requesting the change back (wash-rinse-repeat). This went on for months.

Each office knew what they were doing, and my boss wasn't getting in the middle of their pissing contest. He just sit back and collected the checks.

this is actually a great point and i will use it for spite: those wealthy freelancers must be garbage devs because they are infinitely requested to change / modify / update their projects

(however i grant it could be the stupid client that just doesnt know what they want)