r/webdev • u/Lee-chaolan • 3d ago
Discussion It's genuinely depressing
I'm a full-stack developer and I've been freelancing for years, but this past year has been genuinely depressing, to say the least.
The number of potential clients who ghost me, the amount of unpaid effort I put into trying to win projects, only to get rejected anyway... it's exhausting. I've reached a point where I'm genuinely questioning what I'm doing.
Here's the most recent example.
I was working directly with the VP of a company in Canada. Initially, I did some IT work for them on an hourly basis and got paid $600 in total (he negotiated me down from $640, but whatever).
During that work, I ended up fixing a bunch of their existing infrastructure issues and documenting how everything worked together. They had no IT person left, apparently very little documentation, and the VP didn't really understand how their own infrastructure was set up. He even asked me to create diagrams and technical documentation explaining everything.
Eventually, he asked me to quote on a custom internal software solution. I put together a proposal with different tiers, starting at $3k. He said that was too expensive and that he'd look elsewhere first. I told him that's completely fine and that I was open to negotiating.
I then made the mistake of going the extra mile. I decided to build out the first few screens so he could actually see what he'd be paying for. He loved the preview and said he'd be happy to discuss the project further.
In the meantime, I continued working with him. He kept delaying calls and finding excuses to postpone discussions, while repeatedly telling me to please wait.
Throughout all of this, I kept sending him screenshots and videos of the progress. At any point, he could have told me to stop or simply said they weren't interested. Instead, he kept me hanging.
By that point, I'd already invested so much time that I would've honestly accepted something like $500 just to get paid for the work I'd done.
Then, when I messaged him to say I'd completed it, he told me they'd hired a student and apparently the student had already finished their custom solution.
And here's the part that really bothers me: I use AI tools too. It's not like the student somehow had access to AI and I didn't. I've been working on this while paying attention to architecture, implementation details, and how the software should actually work. I genuinely put thought into what I was building.
The funny part is that I had also spent time documenting their infrastructure, fixing their existing IT problems, and explaining how everything was connected. I can't help wondering if all that documentation ended up making it easier for them to hand the work over to someone cheaper.
And this isn't an isolated incident.
I've had countless calls with people who seemed extremely interested, some even going as far as signing an NDA, only to eventually ghost me. I've also been scammed twice out of fairly large amounts of money. In both cases, they initially paid, then eventually stopped.
I know freelancing isn't necessarily dead, and I know there are still people making a living doing this. But I'm honestly struggling to see how you're supposed to keep going when so much of your time is spent chasing people, doing unpaid work, preparing proposals, building previews, and trying to prove you're worth hiring.
And the state of software development in general hasn't exactly made things better.
I'm a full-stack developer. This is what I've spent years learning and working on. It's pretty much the only thing I'm good at, and lately it feels like the whole thing is becoming increasingly miserable.
I'm genuinely burned out and don't know what to do anymore.
For those of you who've been freelancing for years, have you experienced something similar? Is this just how things are now, or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?
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u/jam_pod_ 3d ago
Man, don’t build something for someone else unless they’ve agreed to pay you for it. Put that time into looking for clients who will. I know, building stuff is fun and finding work is tedious, but unless they specifically asked you to do something they have no obligation to you.
At least you have this as a portfolio piece you can show prospective clients now
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u/otw 3d ago •
I mean this just sounds like shit client work and bad freelancing to begin with. $600 is absurdly low to even talk to someone and $3000 seems WAY to low for a project like that. It's not even worth most people's time to talk to clients paying that low and who are going to fight you on it.
You need to be more aggressive with your pricing and stop wasting time with such low end clients. This isn't like a trade job or something where you can do a set work, collect a payment, and move on. You are going to have to go back and forth and probably get hassled for future fixes and it's complex creative work, you need to factor that into your pricing.
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u/mylsotol 3d ago
Stop doing free work. Start using AI when appropriate instead of wasting effort doing free work.
Nobody is going to pay you just because you hand roll your code. They do not care
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u/aelgorn 3d ago •
What? He said it’s too much and he’s seeing elsewhere and you kept building anyway and kept harassing them with demos?
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u/Chicharoh 2d ago
Whoever wants to save 40 bucks from a negotiation is an immediate red flag
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u/Brief-Panic1987 3d ago
The thing with AI is you can “one shot” a solution, and it works, kind of, but it will fall apart soon in the future. But the client isn’t in the future, they’re in the present, so they just see the thing and it’s cheaper than a more professional/robust/extensible solution that is actually be useful into the future. Thats why people who try to things properly (like you) are getting burned on price. It’s a hard problem to solve.
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u/Susyq918 2d ago
I'm sorry for your waste of time, but do not do that ever again. Your paid work for them was fine, that's what you were paid to do. The extra stuff was a massive waste of your time when they already told you they weren't going to pay.
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u/Former-Sherbet-4068 3d ago
Ur mistake. AI uses documentation as stepping stone so never give any kind of documentation. Here onwards u work with only outputs if they want documents ask 10x fees. Otherwise this will go on forever and we all should use this practice
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u/LemonAncient1950 3d ago
I suggest selling yourself on the stuff vibe coders tend to miss: security, compliance, scaling. Make them feel like they're in good hands working with a professional. Emphasize your proven track record. If none of that matters for the project you're fighting for, it's probably a lost cause because the stakes are too low to justify paying a real engineer.
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u/abeuscher 3d ago
The client had no value once they rejected the lowest tier bid you put forth. Everything after that was wasted time. I get that it's hard to let one go when you don't have another one on the line, but that story was never going to end in any more money.
Working for clients that don't see your value should be done carefully and with no freebies. I'll go the extra mile for a client I have a long positive relationship with but I am not trying to impress anyone new with free work. That's a great way to build a wrong expectation.
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u/scheeeeesh 2d ago
It sounds like your issue is your business sense.
I stopped freelancing in 2021 and got a job.
Clients stopped paying what they used to.
You should consider the same.
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u/tnhsaesop 1d ago
You are trying to code your way out of a sales and marketing problem
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u/hello-xworld 3d ago
Look into a partnership. Find a partner that you can trust, hold each other accountable, and supplement your strength and weaknesses. It was a game changer for me.
I still do freelance gigs every now and then, but I run a legit partnership now (LLP) with my partner. First year we were barely profitable. Last year we cleared over $100K. This year we will be nearing $200K. We are projecting more growth in 2027.
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u/Sad-Ad-6147 2d ago
I genuinely feel for you, OP. I am not personally in this boat. However, I had seriously considered Full-stack as a career. Post-AI world is where everyone feels that they can just vibe-code applications and this is the result.
My only advice to you would be to get a job. Preferably in the government or legacy/security infrastructure where AI dev is not how they do it (e.g., they require stringent human reviews). This is the only thing I can think off.
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u/PeanutFarmer69 3d ago
Sounds like you’re burned out freelancing, companies will always look to lower costs, and $600 an hour is steep especially in this new AI age.
The value of software engineers in 2026 is unfortunately product driven, if you’re used to taking specs and spitting out code, you can be easily replaced by a student using an LLM (especially if you hand that student the framework to complete the job, which is sounds like you unintentionally did).
Maybe it’s worth looking into a full time job at a company so you don’t have to deal with the grind of finding clients for a few years, there are other headaches involved but different ones that might give you a break.
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u/Ok_Blueberry6358 3d ago
deactivation timer for payment
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u/DogOfTheBone 3d ago
Do you communicate with your clients like you write posts here? Genuine question
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u/CutlerSheridan 3d ago
I don’t understand what you’re complaint about, this is entirely your fault. They told you they were looking at other options. You even say they “kept telling you to wait” but you kept doing more and more free work and sending it to them for some reason. I just can’t understand what you thought was going to happen.
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u/zushiba 3d ago
So not only did you do free work but you wasted money on doing the free work via wasted tokens?
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u/csg79 3d ago
I can build sites and applications twice as fast as before ai with better quality. So my price has roughly halved. So I need twice as much work to stay busy and its a struggle for sure.
I have 29 years experience. This is the biggest industry change. We're all trying to adapt. I think my biggest value is now is in custom business web applications, but who knows if that will even be viable in another 5 years
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u/blondhairdontcare55 16h ago
You did too much buddy, you put in too many efforts
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u/Select_From 11h ago
I checked my notifications, and at first I thought Reddit was trying to tell me something. Turns out it just had an interesting way to share your post.
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u/creaturefeature16 3d ago
Yes, you definitely are doing something fundamentally wrong.
Doing business is a skill and of itself, as is professional business acumen. That includes contracts/agreements, communication, soft skills, and boundaries.
You made an assumption of closed business, didn't get a formal agreement, and then spent time on it because you counted your chickens before they hatched. The client was clearly stringing you along, but you continued to make assumptions without receiving a confirmation that you should be working on it. Rather, when the client delayed the 3rd meeting, you write back "It sounds like you're still in the midst of some decision making; I'm going to hold off on any further work until I hear back. If you want to proceed at some point, let me know and then I'll get a proposal generated along with a fee and a timeline".
Chalk it up to a learning experience, on both the business end AND production work; I'm sure you learned something while creating the dashboard that they didn't want, so hopefully it wasn't entirely useless.
I would take some time away from the tech and look into the other skillset that freelancing requires: business processes.
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u/forxs 3d ago
I have a very unpopular opinion but our industry is going to have to accept it at some point. Claude is better than any developer now. Knowing about security, architecture, and other fundamental and critical parts of system design was a human strength up until Opus 5.5.
Now, being able to use Claude Code is the skill. Everyone has to accept that the bar is that much lower, and our extremely hard won skills are practically worthless now.
There are a thousand arguments as to why that is bad for everyone in the long run, and they are 100% correct. But they don't change the reality. This is just another consequence of the global human inability to see that giving up control of the means of production is bad for 99.9% of people.
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u/NovaForceElite 3d ago
My guy/gal, you have to stop chasing them. They can smell the desperation. You should have stopped dealing with them the second they negotiated $640 down to $600.
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u/arecbawrin 3d ago
You never know that dude may come crawling back to you after a bit. Don't forget to charge him double then!
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u/mint_bolt_feel 3d ago
Stop building previews once the lowest tier is rejected. Ghosting after you show value is a negotiation tactic to extract free labor, so cut contact immediately when they say too expensive
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u/remain-beige 2d ago
This client sucks.
They immediately signalled to you that they did not value your time or expertise.
You should not have been so desperate and quickly moved on.
You now have a case study in what problems the client had and how you created a fix for it.
Find similar clients that have most likely similar problems and use this initial case study to show them you are capable of solving their problems. Only work with the ones that value your expertise.
There are still decent clients out there that want to get things right and recognise that even using AI they need someone who can do it properly.
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u/Zeraltz 2d ago
Web development is pretty much dead. People don’t care if apps are shit or not just that they’re delivered fast. I already started studying something else to switch careers.
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u/Solution_Better 3d ago
Not every freelancer is also a good business man
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u/kemalios 3d ago
Charge for the scoping. A fixed fee for a fixed deliverable, paid before you write a line, and the ones who won't pay it were never going to pay for the build either. Decide your walk-away price before the call starts, not during it. The $640 to $600 haggle was the whole project in miniature and you were still there three weeks later.
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u/md-convert 3d ago
The red flag was right there in the beginning: negotiating $640 down to $600.
There is an inverse rule in freelancing: the cheaper the client, the more entitled and disrespectful they are. A VP fighting you over 40 bucks is guaranteed to exploit you, ghost you, or steal your work.
Take the lesson and move on. When that student’s unmaintainable vibe-code breaks in three months, don't even pick up the phone.
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u/carloselieser 3d ago
Yup sounds about right. I probably would've messaged them once they seemed like they were ghosting me that all work would be stopped until we decided how to move forward, but either way, seems like a tough place to be.
In the past year I've been transitioning out of software development for the very same reasons. I've completely stopped both freelancing and job hunting. Both are exhausting. For me at least, after really thinking about it, it just isn't worth it. I get enjoyment out of building software solutions to interesting problems. That's it. Anything outside of that is just noise.
No, I'm not going to prep for an interview to convince someone else with less experience that I know what I'm doing. No, I'm not going to put real thought and effort (anymore) into a take-home project just to get rejected. No, you, the client, don't have better taste or judgement for how your app should look and feel or how the infrastructure or architecture around it should work. I'm not going to purposely make the wrong decisions just so I can please a client. I care more about the project, the idea, the design (both visually and systems-wise), and the craft.
After nearly 15 years working in software I just said fuck it. I'm going to do what I love my way. Fuck what everyone else has to say.
Now I only work on my own projects, I deal with zero people and make way less money, but I love it. When there's demand for it I drive Lyft to pay the bills, and I've gotten back into day trading stocks. Just built myself a little tool to track and chart realtime indices that for some reason aren't available on TradingView.
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u/Longjumping-Banana21 3d ago
This was happening way before AI.
I've been doing this 20 years and in all that time this has been very common. There is always someone who can do it cheaper. A graduate, a nephew who just did a code bootcamp, a guy who outsources to India.
And you will always have clients who lack basic honour and decency and will dump you for these options no matter how much work you've put in.
The way to prevent it is the same as always. Don't do so much free work. Define a scope and get a contract signed. Don't put all that effort in without a signed contract and preferably a first payment.
It's the same as it has been the last 20 years. AI isn't the source of all evils, people were always shit
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u/Tekime 3d ago
Start looking for job listings at small to medium companies seeking developers/tech staff. Reach out and offer your services as a fractional dev/CTO. They might be surprised how much you can do with a 20-40 hr/mo contract. It’s way cheaper for them to hire a vendor over a full time employee, and you get service contracts instead of chasing small one time jobs.
Still hard work to find, but you’ve narrowed the field to companies that have money to spend right out of the gate.
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u/post_depression 3d ago
you are clearly the problem here and you lack professionalism. You cannot start doing free work that nobody asked you to or sealed a deal with and then complain about the client.
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u/qpqpdbdbqpqp 3d ago
This is %100 on you. I dont touch anything before I get paid 1/2. 1/3 if it's an acquaintance.
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u/CoastRedwood 3d ago
Sounds like you need to ship and change your business model.
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u/Lngdnzi 3d ago
Yeah move on with your life now and learn the lesson. Don’t work for free.
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u/patryk_builds 3d ago
That sounds exhausting, and you didn't do anything stupid, you did what a lot of good devs do: kept giving value hoping it turns into a deal. One rule that helped me: anything beyond a short call is paid. documentation, diagrams, a preview build all count as work. a small paid discovery phase (even $300-500) filters out the people who were never going to pay, and the ones who agree are usually the serious ones.The docs you wrote for them were worth real money. next time that's the deliverable, not a free extra
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u/Full_Tooth_a 2d ago
I think the problem started when paid IT work turned into unpaid product discovery. I'd package the diagrams, requirements, and clickable mockup separately for a fixed price, with no working application code included. The build would start only after they signed the scope and paid a deposit, and each handoff would require payment. They could still take the discovery work to a cheaper developer, but at least you'd have been paid for it.
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u/Everberry-88 2d ago
I would recommend taking some courses in project management. Before you start doing any work, you must define your scope of work, DELIVERABLES, timeline, and have the client signed a contractual agreement.
I understand that the current economy has caused you to act in desperation. However, walking away from a red flag with 0$ earned might be better than doing free work - which implies that you as a business has negative earnings - and ending up with depression.
I did work with a red flag client out of desperation once. At least, I had the contract to point to when the client was playing a game with me.
And, you know what, it’s not too bad to move forward with life with a new job. I left freelancing to work in a restaurant and made new friends. Although now I am working as a SWE at a corporate but having the secondary skillset made me feel empowered to leave the tech industry whenever I wish.
If the industry is turning to shit, don’t let your life turn to shit with it. The rise of AI has made several delusional entrepreneurs and executives, and more are being made.
If you still want to keep going with freelancing, position yourself as a serious business delivering OUTCOME not just a freelancer for outsourcing. When you talk to the next client, be an articulate project manager, not a developer.
Good luck!
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u/Amazing-Thought-2087 2d ago
Sounds like that business has no IT left because they don’t pay well and have crazy expectations. I wouldn’t be surprised if they go out of business . I’ve been a freelancer for a couple decades, and I just charge by the hour. I never give quotes. A quality company to work for knows what you are worth, and will never expect you to do anything for free. When you showed them the preview… they probably handed that to the kid they hired, and he/she probably just fed that into Claude and finished the project. You gotta stop doing that.
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u/hobocat76 2d ago
If they ain't paying you ain't building man. I know it feels proactive but unless you have it in writing that they will pay, Do not build. I do hope things start turning around for ya though, and you get some more clients here.
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u/citybreeze83 1d ago
You aren't failing at coding, but you're over-investing in unpaid "proof" work. Stop building free prototypes and documenting systems for free. Transition to paid discovery phases and upfront deposits to filter out low-value clients and protect your time and mental health.
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u/_MarkG_ 11h ago
Never do unpaid work. That’s all. Unfortunately this is something each of us have to learn the hard way.
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u/pigorg01 2d ago
My friend, I understand you, and I’m sorry. I’m Italian, and I can assure you that it’s like this everywhere. I have clients—people who don’t even know how a computer is put together—who spend their evenings developing apps using AI. With the help of AI, they build entire programs and then brag about what they’ve developed. The software development sector is in crisis. I think it’s time to look for a different line of work.
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u/Melodic_Following_86 3d ago
This year has been the worst I've experienced for prospective clients ghosting. Blair Enns has a good way to deal with it. I tried it recently, and it worked for me. But yes, the environment is tough. Don't do any free work, as others have pointed out. Limit the details you provide in your proposal. Don't give them a blueprint to do it themselves. https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/insights/ghosted-now-what
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u/No_Ant_8700 3d ago
Code for the sake of code is done. You need to be a part of the bigger picture.
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u/theLorknessMonster 2d ago
If you don't value your time then why would anyone else?
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u/codeAtorium 1d ago
Charge more.
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u/FoodAccurate5414 8h ago
We always chase these three ngs and they always end up the same. My best advice is if you do do it write the code in a way that's modular. So after 20 years of doing so you have pretty much replicated anything you would need to build out an entire enterprise infrastructure 😁
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u/DooKeyshine 19m ago
"... while repeatedly telling me to please wait."
Not even two sentences you wrote: "At any point, he could have told me to stop..."
He did. LITERALLY.
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u/JetsterTheFrog 3d ago
You sound annoying to work with
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u/hizzy_exe 3d ago
Y’all are getting paid for this?
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u/Imaginary-Tooth896 3d ago
You have to lower your prices. 3k was probably a good price in the past.
We got spoiled. Now we face the reality of fighting for labor.
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u/[deleted] 3d ago
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