So right now it’s 3 years with freelancing work, and till now I was charging $75 per hour and feeling stuck. I’d see job posts asking for **“experienced .NET developers” **offering the same rate I was getting.

But the math was quite imaginary. After taxes and expenses, I was making less than my full-time salary had been!

Then I got a call from a client I’d worked with before. They had a performance problem. Their API was handling 800 requests per second, and their AWS bill was hitting $12,000 monthly. They asked if I could help!

I quoted $160 per hour. Fingers crossed, but they said yes in under five minutes.

That project changed how I think about pricing. The client didn’t care about my rate. They cared that I could save them $8,000 per month. I spent 40 hours on the project and cut their infrastructure costs by 60%. They paid me $6,400. They saved $96,000 that year.

So,

rates aren’t about your time. They’re about the problems you solve.

The Problem With $80/Hour

I see most .NET developers charge between $60 - $100 per hour. I know that because I tracked rates on Upwork, Toptal, peopleforhours, Fiverr, and freelancer communities for six months. Closely, I can say — the average freelance developer globally charges around $100 per hour,** with North American developers typically ranging from $80 to $140.**

But here’s the thing — those rates assume you’re selling hours. You write code, the client gets code, and everyone moves on..

while developers charging $150–250 per hour are selling outcomes. They fix expensive problems. They prevent costly mistakes. They make systems run faster, cheaper, or more reliably.

spending up to eight months trying to “level up” my skills before I understood this. I took courses on microservices. I got Azure certifications. I built side projects to pad my portfolio. None of it helped me raise my rates mann.. and I would say that’s the shittest way!

What changed everything was positioning!

The Stack That Justifies Premium Rates

Let me show you my actual tech stack. It’s about having the specific combination that solves expensive problems.

Nothing special yet. Every .NET developer has this. The difference is in the specializations.

Let’s talk about Performance Stack

This is where rates start climbing. Companies pay premium rates when their systems are slow or expensive to run.

  • BenchmarkDotNet for measuring everything
  • Dapper for high-performance database queries(I wrote too many articles on this.. you should check)
  • Memory profiling with dotMemory and PerfView
  • Span and Memory for zero-allocation code
  • System.Text.Json optimization techniques
  • Custom serialization when needed

I wrote almost all the articles. If you want, I can mark them in a single story page to collect all together… just drop a note here

I charge more because I can show you exactly where your application is wasting money. Last month, I found an N+1 query problem in a client’s system. Their database was executing 2.3 million unnecessary queries per day. I fixed it in three hours. The client’s database costs dropped from $4,200 to $890 per month. He was happy and that’s the only goal! save his pocket and he will make yours!

Cloud & Infrastructure Stack

Almost all companies are in the cloud right now, and they’re terrified of runaway costs. If you can control those costs, you can charge more.

  • Azure (App Service, Functions, Service Bus, Cosmos DB)
  • Docker and containerization
  • Kubernetes basics (you don’t need to be an expert)
  • Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for CI/CD
  • Application Insights and monitoring
  • Cost optimization knowledge

One of my clients got billed around 18k in two months. After taking their mental stress, I found that they were running 24 App Service instances when they needed four, and their Cosmos DB was configured for 10x the throughput they used. LOL… sounds like an unhealthy work environment, cause this

Saved them $14,000 monthly. Charged $1,200. They sent me three referrals.

Architecture Skills That Command Higher Rates

This is where $160+ per hour becomes standard. Most developers can write code. Few can design systems that don’t fall apart under load.

  • Microservices (when they make sense — not always)
  • Event-driven architecture with message queues
  • CQRS and event sourcing patterns
  • Distributed caching strategies
  • API gateway patterns
  • Database sharding and partitioning

Idk why people always jump for microservices? monolithic application handling 500 requests per second but they wanted to scale to 5,000 requests per second for a product launch so they jumping to microservices! I said NO!

Instead, I:

  • Added Redis caching for frequently accessed data
  • And some of the non-critical operations are in background processing.
  • Indexing their tables and Horizontal Scaling for their APIs

Testing & Quality Stack

This might seem boring, but companies pay more when they trust you won’t break their production systems.

  • xUnit for unit testing
  • Integration testing patterns
  • Load testing with k6 or JMeter
  • Mutation testing for critical paths
  • Feature flags for safe deployments

How I Actually Raised My Rates

… let’s see how much of you reach here..

Comment ‘Possibility’ I will see you Friday..

Title for next part will be **‘Uncomfortable Truth’ **so you don’t miss…

*thank you *🖤