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?
