In the Long Run, Indie Hacking Beats Freelancing. Here's why.

Image credit: Keenan Beasley (Unsplash)

You get to pick your own clients, set your own rates, maybe even work from a balcony with beautiful view of the beaches in French Polynesia. Sounds perfect right? This is the dream of many developers once they decide to start freelancing until reality hits. Too many calls, deadlines creeping, clients ghosting you and your "freedom" starts to look like a job with multiple bosses and too many emails.

While too many developers are drooling over freedom through freelancing, there is a quiet movement of solo developers skipping the client drama entirely. They are building tiny tools over a single weekend, some in a month, that earns money every single month without ever jumping on a Zoom call.

The most exciting part is they are not chasing unicorn status. They are building tiny products that solve one specific problem for a small group of people.

This post isn't a theory. It's built on real stories of developers who chose the indie hacker route. Those who traded short term freelance paychecks for long term ownership and in the long run, they are winning.

Lets see why.

Freelancing Pays Now, SaaS Pays Forever

Freelancing offers immediate returns. You complete a project, send an invoice, and get paid. Its like getting paid to build someone else's house. It's straight forward and fast money but it ends the second you stop hammering.

SaaS on the other hand, is a long game. It takes more time upfront to research, build and launch a product. It's like planting a weird little money tree. It takes a long time to sprout but you keep watering it everyday with doubt and caffeine. Once the tree sprouts, it can generate income with minimal ongoing effort.

Lets consider one successful indie hacker, Tham Nguyen. She didn't chase clients. She built a tool that allows individuals and businesses to build an AI workforce and named this tool MindPal. In under two years, MindPal is bringing in $500k annual recurring revenue. All she did is to just build, listened closely to her customers and kept on shipping the right features.

Freelance gigs can pad your wallet for the month. But products like Mindpal, they pad your future.

Clients Scale Stress, Not Income

Freelancing sounds great until you realize every new client is a new boss with their own ASAP timeline. Of course, it's flexible but it comes with scalability issues.

As a freelancer, your income is in direct proportion to your time and capacity. You can raise your rates and take on more clients but both options eventually hit a ceiling. And when they do, stress creeps in. Each client brings their own quirks. One wants hourly updates, the next one always has one tiny change (which is never tiny) and another client ghosts you for a week.

More clients don't necessarily mean more freedom. In fact, they mostly mean more meetings, more project management and more risk of burnout.

However, if you have a SaaS product, scaling is very different. Once the product is built and fundamental systems are in place, more users create marginal work. Ten new users in a week? Great, no meetings required. You don't need to triple your hours or clone yourself to handle growth.

David Bressler, founder of FormulaBot in his own words said:

I don't need a big piece of the market, a small piece is more than enough to live the lifestyle I'm living now - it's a calm lifestyle: quality family time, few vacations a year, ride bikes to drop off and pick up my kids, work out several times a week, low stress.

Source: IndieHackers.com

SaaS Builds an Asset, Freelancing Builds a Job

In freelancing, you earn by delivering work. It could be writing code or designing. This is called the service-based model.

Though it could be lucrative, the model is linear. That means no work, no income. Think of it as a vending machine that only works when you kick it every time you want a snack. No kick, no chips.

You are essentially building a job for yourself, one where you are responsible for both execution and client management.

In contrast, SaaS is different. Build it once and it keeps working even when you are out walking your dog. This is not to say you will do absolutely nothing after launching your SaaS product. There will be bugs to squash, feedback to process and the occasional "urgent" feature request from a passionate user in a different timezone.

The key difference here is that you are not on the treadmill of trading time for money. You are improving the asset and that scales it without multiplying your workload.

With freelancing, you start from scratch with every new paycheck while with SaaS, you are stacking bricks on something that lasts.

Freelancing lets you rent out your skills, SaaS allows you to own the system.

You Can Productize What You Know

Your expertise does not have to stay hidden in contracts and client meetings. You unique processes, insights and experience can be turned into a product. If you have solved a problem three times and explained it to a friend once, you may have a product idea.

This could take the form of a SaaS tool, a course or a template. The key is to identify recurring problems you've solved and package those solutions in a scalable way. You don't need to be a genius. You just have to stop hoarding your brain.

David Bressler, founder of FormulaBot is proof enough for this argument. David was already a Data Analyst before building FormulaBot, an AI tool that enables users to upload files like Excel or PDFs and chat with the data to generate charts, tables and insights.

By turning your knowledge into a product, you are no longer limited by the number of hours you can work. It's a shift from selling time to selling value.

Freelancing Doesn't Teach You Leverage

Freelancing is an excellent way to sharpen your skills and earn income on your own terms. You learn how to juggle clients and smile through "just one more tweak". But Leverage, not so much.

Leverage is your unfair advantage. It is when your work earns after you are done working. Leverage is about decoupling your time from your income. It's about writing code once and serving to thousands. It's about you packaging your knowledge into a product. It's about using tools, content or whatever works for you to scale impact without scaling effort. SaaS forces you to learn marketing, distribution and automation and all these are skills multiply your time.

To thrive long term, it is very necessary to transition from service delivery to asset creation.

Final Thoughts

Freelancing teaches you how to work and that is good. But indie hacking teaches you how to scale that work.

And yes, building a micro-SaaS is hard. You will wrestle with bugs and wonder if anyone cares but every line of code you ship is an investment, not just a task. You are not building a job, you are building an asset. An asset that grows beyond hours and creates real freedom.

I am currently walking this path. I am documenting my wins, failures and lessons as I try to make a living with my skills; without freelancing or a full time job.

If that's a journey you are interested in, subscribe to my newsletter where I share behind-the-scenes insights and stories from the trenches of solo dev life.

Because the sooner I start building leverage, the sooner I stop renting out my time. And that is the goal.