High-impact devops consulting. "Migrate me from expensive on-premise hosting to a private cloud running Openstack, because I have regulatory requirements that prevent me from going public cloud. This will save me $1.5M/yr in hosting costs". Great, that'll be a half-mil right to the engineer's pocket, TYVM, we'll be ready to launch in 8 months.
"We have zero CI/CD expertise in-house, build us a pipeline that does all the things vis a vis testing, deploy, etc". OK, that'll be $90k, we'll have it done in 2 weeks, plus another week for training your team on its use and upkeep.
"Our CTO is actually the tech person, and he's tired of provisioning VPCs and VMs by hand. His time is better spent doing more business-ey things" Poof, here's your CM deploy that lets your CTO either update a single YAML file and press 'go' to spin up all the things, or allows him to hire a junior/mid-level to twist all the knobs and pull all the levers. $300k please, it'll be ready to go in six weeks.
I have built systems like that or had jobs where stuff like that was part of it (CI/CD applies to most jobs actually). There is no way I could charge money anything like that. You are in a bubble full of money. 95% of even US businesses will not spend money like that for most projects. That's a small market of only the largest cash-rich businesses if you want those rates.
Some huge portion of businesses are trying to do those things. Most are small or medium sized businesses and they just can't spend that kind of money in a short time frame.
I mean, CI/CD is actually the new standard, so everyone is trying to get there. Same with deploying VMs -- the new standard is to do it automatically. That stuff falls under DevOps, which again, is the standard now for people that know what they are doing, and it can't really be separated from the other aspects of development anyway. There are millions of developers working on better integrating DevOps into their organizations who are not making $200,000 or more per year. That's just not a realistic wage for most areas of the world.
But if you have access to those clients good for you. Just don't pretend everyone can get that.
It's such a small market that there's multiple businesses who focus on it?
www.stelligent.com
www.reactiveops.com
www.fuzzy-logic.org
none of these businesses are hurting - in fact, they're growing. $300k, in the scope of an individual, is a staggering amount of money to most. To a (healthy) business, it's more along the lines of a small/medium capital investment. A lot of the pitch is "You can home-grow this over the course of X years, making occasional mis-steps and paying your expensive engineering salary along the way, with every hour they spend developing this automation thing being an hour they're not spending developing your core product. Alternatively, you can pay Y and have it done in weeks/months while your FTE staff focuses on your core product the entire time. You get to reap the return (on time, on money, on agony, whatever) much faster, you have experts setting it up right the first time, and it's delivered turn-key, with training, to your FTE staff so they can start using it immediately"
There's a reason most engineering talent is under-paid, and it has much to do with the individuals not understanding the business mindset, the actual value of the services they provide to the business, and frankly being snowed by 'big personality, business-oriented' hiring managers. $200k for a talented mid-level engineer with a history of producing should be the 'good start' number, not the 'pie in the sky' one, not just in SV but from sea to shining sea.
I have done works for companies just to see another group do similar work for the same companies and charge absolutely no less than 5 times as much.
Problem is when you start at x the companies will never pay you 3x or 5x again. You just started too low.
However, they will gladly drop you and pay someone else 5x and justify it and not even remember you were ever here and not even feel the pang of the new amount they are paying.
Side note: NEVER EVER EVER let the companies you are working with know you are a freelancer. For all they know you are WE. Let them assume the size of your team.
"We have zero CI/CD expertise in-house, build us a pipeline that does all the things vis a vis testing, deploy, etc". OK, that'll be $90k, we'll have it done in 2 weeks, plus another week for training your team on its use and upkeep.
"Our CTO is actually the tech person, and he's tired of provisioning VPCs and VMs by hand. His time is better spent doing more business-ey things" Poof, here's your CM deploy that lets your CTO either update a single YAML file and press 'go' to spin up all the things, or allows him to hire a junior/mid-level to twist all the knobs and pull all the levers. $300k please, it'll be ready to go in six weeks.
so on, and so forth.