Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be

Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be: 1) pick a specialty, so you have little or no competition, in a field where your clients all have a lot of money to spend and then must spend it on someone (with their only option being you) 2) have very skilled very connected sales people constantly getting your next contract, you need to have maybe a half year's worth of projects always lined up and ready to go 3) build a reputation, so then even amongst your very few competitors, people ask around when they need a job done, and your name always come up near the top of the list When you crunched the numbers at the end, 60% of the employees were always making billable hours on a project at any time, and our clients paid the company maybe 4x per hour what they paid the employees. So very little profit total for the company, but enough to be sustainable. Oh, and the sales guys were the best paid by far, all making at least double what our founders/c-level made. Now, if I was just on my own, I have no idea how I would be able to recreate those conditions. I don't currently have some kind of ridiculous specialty or reputation, so I'd just be nameless in an endless pool of candidates. Then with such a lopsided demand-supply balance, I'd get paid the minimum level humanly possible, and then even lower than that if they were willing to put up with remote workers from different timezones. There's no way I'm hiring a sales guy to build me a pipeline, and if I was that good at doing so myself, I'd be way better off just joining a company and get paid millions to sell much more valuable contracts instead. So, instead, probably once I find a client, I would probably want to maximize how many times I come back to them as a repeat customer. So then at point I'm basically now an employee of sorts, who gets paid as little as possible, and is actively trying to be replaced by someone cheaper at any time. So, uh, yeah, that all just translates to, I'd always go for a salaried employee position. The calculus in the company's mind with regards to compensation just changes completely once you're at that point, more along the lines of what I've referred to previously.