I’ve been thinking about this lately.
Freelancing gives you cash flow and flexibility, but it feels like you are trading your precious time for money. A product business looks more scalable in time, but comes with slower returns and business risks.
For those who’ve done one or both long term, which model actually holds up over the years? Not just financially, but overall?
Curious to hear real experiences from you guys.
I never did freelancing except for my own prodcuts taht is proffitable, but to work on some other products that are not mine, I don’t think it is worth it..
Also, these days, freelancing sites (like upwork are filled with AI “developers,” and mediocre devs… and my experience there was horrible. I needed to fix a slider and tried to hire almost 30 devs. Absolutely all of them asked for money even though they couldn’t solve the issue. Most of them didn’t even understand the problem, thinking they could fix it with AI.
Before creating items, I did freelancing, building websites in Adobe Flash. I made more than 50 over 2–3 years, with prices between $2K and $5K, working with a company from Germany and another from Canada. They were probably making many times more than I was.
Then I moved to FlashComponents and had sold about 20K _ lincenses sold in 2-3 years, then moved to Envato, and the rest is history. My biggest mistake over the year was not having my own website to collect my clients’ emails, I should have made a basic register… but I played the Envato game for too long…
We are going through uncertain times in the industry. I am finishing two products and continuing to add my plugins to WordPress—it’s a slow process. So far, I have six. I keep learning new things and going with the flow. Nobody knows what will happen a year from now; all we can do is try to adapt as best as possible.
It is depressing, hell yes, I have days I don’t feel like doing anything 
I have friends in Cluj, Romania, and they all lost their jobs and couldn’t find new ones, developers with ten+ years of experience, senior devs. The issue is that most companies in Romania were focused on outsourcing rather than creating products as we do.
We are going through some hard times. If, in the future, AI becomes so advanced that it can read our minds and turn our ideas into reality, then basically all jobs could be lost, so it wouldn’t matter what your profession you have we are all scrwed and this elite monsters that rule the world now they will be some semigods I hope we will wake up in time and find some balance, we all know that AI is not made to make the world a better place for the majority of us but to make the rich richer, personallyI don’t understand if you have 500 bilions in your account why do you want more? Instead, you could actually help the world to be better and still have money for a thousand lifetimes. The world is ruled by evil, and it wants to get the worst out of all of us…
I apologize for diverging from the subject. Is freelancing good? Yes — if you have the stomach for it, because you’ll have to get outside of your comfort zone and work with all kinds of weirdos…
I’d say:
) who’s better at the tech side than the people side (like myself), I think a product business gives you more opportunity.Freelancing also has the downside of dealing with unpleasant people, unreasonable expectations, customers asking for things that are out of scope / out of contract, etc.
A sample of my freelance customers before I started selling products:
Let me tell you a story from a Turkish guy and one of my products
https://codecanyon.net/item/ultimate-3d-carousel-wordpress-plugin/18948914
This guy contacted me and asked me to create a three-row carousel instead of a single one. For about a month, I worked with him — he even showed me his home and office. He paid me around $500, and he was supposed to pay another $1,500 after I finished.
I ended up going much further than I should have for this project, adding extra features he requested for free. This was before the AI days, so updates weren’t easy.
The carousel ran in a campaign in Turkish malls on about four touch units, so it was probably a big deal and he likely made a lot of money from it.
As soon as I finished and sent him the files, I never heard from him again — and I never received the remaining payment, his phone disappeared, email gone is like he never existed…
So… never trust anybody 
Worst experience was with a Romanian. He kept calling me “boss” until I completely lost my temper. There was no respect — he even called me at 4 a.m. It got so bad that I wanted to go to Bucharest to see him personally. Back then, I was a 120 kg athlete and a real monster. In the end, it was about three weeks wasted. Since that day, I’ve never worked with Romanians again… and I’ve had many opportunities.
Not gonna lie, there’s a few clients I’d want to set a bodyguard type like this to pay them a visit
I also did a bit of freelancing, mostly on my plugins.
In 2016-2017, I was just starting creating plugins and a Romanian guy contacted asking for a custom plugin which would aggregate news from different sites and create a news listing website like alltop.com - he also mentioned that he was low on funds and if I can still make this plugin he needed. I came up with the idea that ok, I make him the plugin, will ask lower price for it, but I will also sell it on CodeCanyon.
He agreed, was totally happy with the price and the proposal. Development went well, the plugin was created, the payment was made. Everything ok, the guy set up his site, I published the plugin on CodeCanyon for sale.
I remember it got 2-3 sales in the initial month, it was nothing of a “wow factor”.
After 2-3 months, the guy contacted me again, that hey, I should remove the plugin from sale from CodeCanyon and give him full exclusivity, as it was his original idea. I refused, showed him our email exchanges.
He got really stubborn on this, contacted Envato and claimed that he had full rights on the product and I am infringing his IP. After a couple of email exchanges, even an attorney contacted me from his part, telling me that he is going to go all in with this and he will sue me if I don’t remove the plugin from CodeCanyon.
I already had a very stressful period in that part of my life, my daughter was a couple of years old, so I removed the plugin from Envato and closed discussions with the guy. The ugly part is that this was after tooo many emails exchanged with him, I invested quite a lot of energy in this. But this is how people learn.
Some of his claims, summarized (including it, just for fun):
- I (the customer) own the full copyright of the plugin because it was my concept and I paid for its development. The plugin belongs to me. Although I allowed it to be sold on CodeCanyon and it was released under GPL, that does not transfer ownership.
- At the beginning, I allowed it to be sold on Envato, but this applied only to version 1.0. That permission was not unlimited or permanent.
- Since I own the full copyright, I have the right to change my decision. I did not grant a lifetime license to sell the plugin.
- Starting with version 1.1.1, I am not allowing it to be sold anymore and this decision must be respected.
- From my perspective, the previous GPL licensing should no longer apply to version 1.1.1 and later.
Yes, it seems the Romanians are not that honest …we have it in our blood, I guess… I alwayws have always been honest when working with someone!
Today I had a client who bought a plugin, but they are using a minification plugin that is also minifying my code, which breaks the plugin. I asked them to disable minification for my plugin, and their reaction was to block the refund and stop responding.
We all say that until we work with one, all experieces I had with Romania were horrible when it comes to work!
