I started my career 10 years ago doing exactly this (also from a 3rd world country). Within 3 months I reached 1.5k/mo while finishing my engineering degree. It

I started my career 10 years ago doing exactly this (also from a 3rd world country). Within 3 months I reached 1.5k/mo while finishing my engineering degree. It wasn't that hard (not sure about now) since all you had to do is demonstrating that you're capable of completing the project in your bid. I did this by describing what kind of stack that I'll use, potential problems that will likely arise and how to address it, or even try to steer the project owner to use stack I'm more capable of by describing its benefits compared to their chosen stack (if they requires the project to be written with a specific language/framework). I imagine those freelancing sites is 10x more saturated now than 10 years ago, but perhaps it's still possible to reach 1.5k/mo in a few months. Like other people said, it's probably best to pick your niche to narrow down potential projects and reducing competition. I was mostly bidding on python projects back then (not as many python programmers back then and a gazillion of php programmers). After I got my degree, I emailed one of my past client that I'm now available for full time work and he connect me to someone that was looking for full time developer and the rest is history.