I completely understand your feelings as I'm in a similar situation these days. I'm from India and I've got 8.5 years of experience in consumer and SaaS startup

I completely understand your feelings as I'm in a similar situation these days. I'm from India and I've got 8.5 years of experience in consumer and SaaS startups + another 3 years as a freelancer prior to that. During 2005-2009, I used to get a lot of freelancing jobs, but as you mentioned, decent paying freelance work is hard to find these days. I've been without a job for a week and don't want to take up another job right now. I just want to make $2.5K so that I can work on my own SaaS idea. I'm a PHP dev like you but I've also worked a lot on frontend (Angular, React/Redux, Backbone). I've tried AngelList, Hackernews and pretty much all other sites mentioned on HN with very little success. If you are good at PHP/Laravel, you can probably try larajobs.com. Good Luck.