It's pretty straight forward in terms of pros and cons. Cons: You'll need to tighten your budget to account for the missing 12k. Depending on your country's

It's pretty straight forward in terms of pros and cons. Cons: You'll need to tighten your budget to account for the missing 12k. Depending on your country's tax rules, you'll contribute less to government benefit programs, which could have a small effect later. At worst, you'll see how you could have tightened your budget already and been saving and investing that money (12k over 10 years can result in maybe 150k). One last con. If you do this, but don't follow through with effort, you'll potentially carry that mental weight. It seems like you're already past that kind of problem though, given how well you've used your time to build something else successful. Pros: There's no better time to trade back some money for your time than when you are younger, get paid less, and have fewer obligations. It's also easier to tighten a budget when you live alone (you don't say, but I'm making some assumptions). You've already had some success, so committing more time to this effort of independence can be seen as a reasonable and even smart investment. Strike while the iron is hot. If you start earlier, that gives you more time to slowly build successful independent software businesses, and you'll need that time. It can take a while. As others have said, you can always go back to working full time (maybe with another job and maybe even a pay rise). You can further mitigate risk by setting some sort of arbitrary deadline, such as "I'll do this for 1 year and stop only if I haven't made more traction". Parting thoughts: I wish you the best of luck. If you haven't already, it seems like you'd enjoy and benefit from Pieter Levels book at https://readmake.com https://readmake.com.