Ask HN: How much money do you make from freelance client projects?

I pretty much stopped freelancing once oDesk and Elance merged into Upwork, but back then I could probably earn between 10k and 20k USD annually before taxes. Admittedly, I'm a lazy programmer. Good luck with your project!

Free until you get me my first paid project.

99$ month after.

I had a look at Sieve. I like your vision and I'm eager to see what you'll be to able to contribute to make that vision a reality.

For my business in particular, such an all-in-one product doesn't make sense because I already have tools and processes in place for covering the various aspects of the business:

- website

- proposal management

- requirements engineering

- accounting

- CRM

- document management

- process automation (via Zapier, mostly)

I like to see this as a more UNIX kind of approach with specific tools for specific jobs that communicate with each other if needed. Even if I were to forego this approach in favour of a single tool or product that product would have to be better by at least an order of magnitude compared to my current setup. For what essentially still amounts to a process and management tool that's quite a tall order.

Freelancing / consulting isn't a one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter kind of business. Therefore, a unified product that tries to cover every aspect of the business probably isn't going to cut it, at least for those who've already been in the business for some time. However, they're likely also the most interesting audience for a product such as yours because they tend to have more revenue than businesses that just start out.

There's an admittedly - and unfortunately - quite large group of freelancers though your product might be very useful to: Those that don't do any kind of marketing (i.e. they often don't even have a website) and mostly rely on manual processes and middlemen to do their marketing for them.

I have used or looked into past and existing services that attempted some or all of these features. Every client project is different and a client typically already has their own preferred stack for communication, onboarding and payments. As a freelancer, I already use services like Gusto and Harvest and don't want to consolidate into a single platform (they do what they do very well).

So the only thing you can really offer that freelancers would pay for is really good leads. IMO that will be very hard to package as a SaaS service. Look at LinkedIn Pro Finder - it takes a "client" 2 minutes to fill out a project request and about the same for a freelancer to respond. Most people are just messing around, very few are serious or have a real budget or project.

I know people who pay individuals (also freelancers) to find leads and generate business. You could do that but how do you scale it? If you charge a monthly fee then how long will people stay signed up without any leads? If you charge a percentage based on a project, how do you verify the cost of the project? What if it's hourly for an indeterminate period?

As far as how much we make it varies from small projects in the 20-30k range to over 100k for bigger projects.