I've been freelancing as a full-stack developer since 2018. In previous years I typically earned between $80,000 and $120,000 USD, but this year I'm on track to make only around $15,000. Is the freelance development market broadly this bad, or could the problem be my niche, pricing, client acquisition, or the type of work I offer? I'd especially like to hear what other freelancers are earning, where their work comes from, and how AI tools have affected their businesses.
5 Answers
There are still freelancers having strong years, especially those with long-term clients, a niche, or a strong referral and content-driven pipeline. But many others are down sharply, so this probably isn’t just an individual failure. It may be worth rebuilding your marketing around visible expertise, case studies, and business results while exploring adjacent services such as consulting, training, infrastructure, integrations, or technical support. Some people are also moving into contractor roles or nontraditional tech services to reduce dependence on one-off web projects.
The market isn’t equally bad for everyone. One freelancer reported staying around $150,000–$175,000 by retaining established clients, working with a well-connected designer, and focusing on WordPress, Shopify, and ongoing business needs. The common theme is that repeat relationships and referrals are far more reliable than anonymous job boards. Positioning around a specific outcome—such as improving ecommerce conversion, automating operations, or maintaining a critical system—can work better than advertising yourself as a general full-stack developer.
AI has changed client expectations even when it hasn’t replaced the actual engineering work. Many clients assume a tool can produce a complete project for a small monthly fee, so they never hire a developer in the first place. Others return later with fragile, undocumented code after trying to build it themselves. The opportunity is increasingly in complex integrations, production fixes, security, scaling, maintenance, and business systems that require judgment rather than just writing code.
A steep drop may mean that one or two major clients disappeared rather than the entire market vanishing. I’d analyze where your previous revenue came from, which clients are still active, and what work they continue doing manually. Maintenance retainers, SEO, CMS updates, hosting, internal tools, and automation may be easier to sell than new builds. Businesses still pay for systems that connect messy data sources or need to run reliably, because AI-generated code doesn’t remove the cost of failures.
One of my clients has supplier feeds with mismatched product codes and huge data imports. That kind of operational problem still needs someone accountable when it breaks, regardless of how good coding assistants become.
A lot of freelancers are reporting the same slowdown. Simple websites, CRUD apps, landing pages, and basic MVPs have become much easier for clients or small teams to produce with AI tools, and layoffs have also pushed more experienced developers into the freelance market. That combination has made competition and price pressure much worse. Existing clients and referrals seem to be holding up better than cold leads or one-off projects.
My work shifted from roughly 60% new clients and 40% repeat clients to almost entirely repeat business. New inquiries have nearly disappeared.
I’ve seen several startup clients pause development to build their products themselves, then come back after ending up with broken code and no workable deployment.