If you're good you can charge roughly U.S. rates as a freelancer. Keep getting projects, testimonial and after every project where your clients were ecstatic, h

If you're good you can charge roughly U.S. rates as a freelancer. Keep getting projects, testimonial and after every project where your clients were ecstatic, hike your rates by 30% or 50% or more, until client's are "merely" happy.[1] The lower salary only means one thing - you can get by being a less experienced developer in India than in the U.S. People aren't willing to pay even $40k for a Joomla programmer who has done nothing but gone through the tutorial, but they might be willing to pay $5k for one, and there's only so many places in the world where one can get by for that little. This incidentally also mislead hiring managers in India thinking everyone will accept salaries that low, so they set their salary cap that low, and only people who are inexperienced or those unwilling to work for themselves on the internet will accept that low of a salary. Having heard various stories and my own experience, there's definitely difference between outsourcing to an Indian consulting firm than to an Australian (or even Russian/Ukrainian) one. [1] Two examples: https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~014440ca451f6d05fd/ https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~014440ca451f6d05fd... He looks like he's charging $45 on a short term basis and $25 for full time, long term work, which equates to $50k. https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01ec0a80c3dfdb1477/ https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01ec0a80c3dfdb1477... At $40 per hour, that's only 250 hours of work per year to reach $10k.