I've been full stack for about 15 years in various industries and thinking about pursuing this.

How'd you get started? What kind of pricing model do you use? Any tips on getting started?

Currently working on a portfolio website I can use for marketing to get started. Thinking about targeting small businesses (restaurants, HVAC, etc types) that aren't tech savvy.


I've built various fun projects outside of my regular 9-5 but nothing monetary. Mainly for self learning, etc.

Not full time but do sporadic projects from time to time, I'm a designer with enough HTML/CSS knowledge to be dangerous (now doing product design).

The big challenge is that it's hard to justify designing and developing a full website for a small business when they could be up and running on Squarespace, Wix, etc., for a whole lot cheaper with most of the benefits. You'd need to find ways to demonstrate the value you'd bring over what they could do for less on other platforms.

I've thought about it in the past (full stack dev for about 19 years), but ultimately I've always ended up just deciding it wasn't worth it for me.

1. As mentioned, most people can do basic web stuff themselves now.
2. Most people who need an actual developer have no idea what actual development costs.
3. Most people have no idea what they actually want (or the idea they actually want is way more complicated than the idea they floated initially)

You can work through all of these issues, but it will just take more time/effort.

Obviously there is side work available as there are plenty of people out there doing that for their income....but I pretty quickly got to the point where it wasn't worth the hassle, unless something happens to fall in my lap.