The only "online platform with quality jobs" that I know of is StackOverflow Careers. :) Sadly, anonymous online marketplaces are not the way to get decent-pay

The only "online platform with quality jobs" that I know of is StackOverflow Careers. :) Sadly, anonymous online marketplaces are not the way to get decent-paying, non-crazy people to hire you for software gigs. I know some people have success with Elance or Craigslist, but I recommend looking at your personal network again. The trick is not to ask people, "Need any software?" No one will ever say yes to this: no one needs "software." They have enough "software" and they hate the software they have. What they need is solutions to problems they may not even know they have. What works better is watching people work, or asking them about their work. You can use the pretense of wanting to learn how they use software, or whatever. Just watch them work, and look for pain points, bottlenecks, manual-but-automatable steps, etc. Dig a little deeper to understand the problem as they do. Explore ways to address it with software. Offer to build a mockup/do a demo/write up a proposal (1 page description of what you could do and how it would help) and walk through it with your friend's boss. To borrow a patio11-ism, this is the "Find an Excel workbook that someone edits and emails to someone else; then replace it with software" approach to finding freelance opportunities. And it's an approach I've stumbled into as well. My personal testimonial to this approach is that my first freelance opportunity accidentally grew out of helping my mother with some work. I wrote a Java app that did some web searches for her and parsed/saved some numbers. Very crude app, yet it saved her hours a day. Then her boss heard about it. 10 years later, that app has grown into a suite of applications that launched my consulting business, earned me probably $50-80k over the years, and has easily made my mother's company millions of dollars.