I agree. There's probably a dead zone somewhere in the middle. One side of the deadzone there's an equilibrium doing fulltime at a mediocre hourly rate. The

I agree. There's probably a dead zone somewhere in the middle. One side of the deadzone there's an equilibrium doing fulltime at a mediocre hourly rate. The other side of the deadzone there's an equilbrium doing a very small number of hours at an exorbitant rate. But for that latter model, I would expect a significant number of non-billable hours for project acquisition. (Maintaining client relationships outside of paying projects, doing sales work around new leads, doing stuff like PR and writing articles and whatever else you do to be recognized as an expert/authority in some field, etc. etc.) so that the billable and non-billable hours probably also average out towards a mediocre effective hourly-rate. Early in your career, that probably means you have to do crazy hours there too. Later on, you might get dividends in the form of not having to work so hard on sales any more.