You have to think it from the point of view of the potential employer/customer. Why do they want to hire a freelancer in the first place? 1. Maybe they have 5

You have to think it from the point of view of the potential employer/customer. Why do they want to hire a freelancer in the first place? 1. Maybe they have 50-100 hrs of work per month that requires skillset X. If none of their existing employees can do X, they will hire a freelance just to avoid the hassle of having an employee sitting on his hands most of the day. 2. Maybe they have a project demanding 50-100 hrs of work per week, for the next 6-8 months, then they expect to drop maybe to 3-5 hrs per week of maintenance/operations. They will hire a couple of freelances to implement the project, with the explicit purpose of letting them go at the end. They may consider keeping a proven-good freelance on a retainer (small fixed fee, little or no work) for maintenance, employee training, emergency issues, etc. 3. Maybe skill X is something that is not seen as a core strength for the customer's company. It does not matter if they have demand to consume enough of X to keep one or more full time employees busy. If they see an advantage to file as a variable expense (instead of payroll), they will do so (they may be charging a different department in the same corporation for it, or using money from a government grant, or some other technical detail like those). Those are the reasons that come to mind, but there surely must be others. Please note that none of the reasons listed implied that freelancers are more skilled, experienced, or cheaper than employees. As a matter of fact, there is a market for freelances across all skill levels (barred crass incompetence). It is just a matter of figuring out what level fits best for you, and then project a professional image that reinforces that level. My perception is that this is what your customers are trying to tell you. Your image is "cheap" compared to the value you end up bringing to their businesses. If you increased your prices, you probably would end up having more work (because you would no longer be perceived as cheap/rookie/unreliable). You may need to use more clues, like dressing up a notch, or redoing your webpage/contact info to project a more mature image.