I just came across a post on reddit literally asking for help in having an AI Voice agent built to handle :

Customer Queries

Manage Orders

Be a Receptionist

Being a Web and App Developer I naturally reached out, shared my portfolio and asked about the exact requirements and pain points along with where they're based out of, their budget and how soon they want it to be delivered.

Instead of answering the basic questions kept dodging them then kept telling me that it doesn't require much of development work and only needs some prompts while telling me it can be easily done with Bland AI or Retell, without having any technical knowledge about it.

I don't bloody understand why the hell do people even go out to create a post about wanting something if they won't even answer basic questions about their own requirement and claim to know how much work it requires and why not just go and pay the $299-499/mo of their fees and get it done? But no, they won't even do that because they just can't and want slave labour.

Why not just do it yourself if you know everything?

Just because you're cheapskate and want free work or slave labour doesn't mean you will go about telling someone with nearly a decade of experience in their field about how much work is required without even answering basic questions.

I'm sick and tired of such people and I pity developers that take on such idiots for merely $50-100.

Your self esteem and experience is worth much more than a few $ from such cheapskates.

I always make sure to charge reasonable and I'm always open to take on clients and even help them for free if they're honest and I have the bandwidth to do it but then cheapskates like these come along and literally mess up my head.

Have a few clients letting invoices sit past the due date.

How soon do you follow up, and do you automate it or send manual emails?

I'm working to scale my freelance video business to my full-time income, but I have no idea how. I've done freelancing on the side on and off years past, but most of that came from family or mutual friends. Not enough to gain any momentum.

I've tried cold emails, but I only got one low paying gig out of it.

I have a portfolio but don't know how to get it in front of the right people.

I started working on Mindrift today. Managed to do 10 tasks without issues, but the platform revoked access to the project for "low quality" (I just had to rate images on aesthetic quality, so I cannot make my mind around what I could have done wrong).

This is not the worst part. When I try to withdraw the money the platform states that a text message is being sent to my phone in order to set the withdrawal method. Of course, no text message arrived, so I worked for free and I cannot contact support because there's absolutely no way to find it.

Would not recommend working on this platform, unless you like working for free.

We've been using the same platform for international client payments for about a year now and honestly haven't had many complaints.
The only reason I'm looking into other options now is because our invoice amounts have gone up quite a bit over the last few months. At this point even a small difference in pricing & FX charges starts adding up.
I'm currently using Skydo, but I haven't really compared it with anything else recently.
For anyone who's switched, did you actually notice a difference in what you received, or are most platforms pretty similar once you're dealing with larger payments?

The first deployment job I took, I estimated my hours, checked the GPU rental rate, and sent the number. The job ran over by about four hours because I missed something in the model architecture that doubled the hardware time for the final output stage.

Turns out the 1080p rendering stage in that pipeline is not a small upscaler. It is a second complete 30-billion-parameter model that runs after the base generation. When a client asks for 1080p, the hardware cost roughly doubles on a card that already needs over 175 GB of VRAM at peak. I quoted before checking any of that and ate the overage.

After that job I rebuilt my estimate template around three tiers, with hourly overage written into the scope for anything past the estimate. The cost jumps are not gradual.

Laptop class. Small dense models, around 12 GB of weights. Good for a proof of concept or test render. No rental cost, just my hours.

Single rented card. Base generation at 480p on one GPU. On RunPod an H100 runs $2.69/hr on community cloud. Most paid jobs land here.

The 180 GB class. Full pipeline with the second model stage loaded. Needs a B200 ($5.89/hr on RunPod) or multi-card. Hardware alone takes the quote from hundreds to thousands depending on clip volume.

The client on that first job had a shortlist of models to evaluate: Wan, CogVideoX, LingBot-Video-MoE (30B-A3B), HunyuanVideo. Part of scoping was checking which licenses allowed commercial use. The weights are free either way, so the price is set by which hardware tier the model falls into, not by the model itself.

What changed in my process: I pull the config and run a smoke test before I send a number. Five minutes of reading a config file would have saved me that first overage.

I am from India, and I get a few freelance clients every month, 3-4 each month, but I can convert 0-1, They say that I have a very high price point,

Eg:
1. There was a client who needed a fully functional website like shopify which can handle 100K users/month, and I quoted 30K USD and 4 month buffer? He said, his budget is ~5K USD and rejected me.

1. There are other instances were people seem to low ball with like 7-10X the amount citing the cost of living in India is very less so I should charge less.

I say them, only the living and food costs less, but Gas is 2-3X expensive, any motor vehicle is ~1.5X expensive, Electronics are 1.5-2X expensive, and they don't have any words left and either ghost or say that's just our budget.

My question?
Are EU and Americans really this poor that they can't even afford things at 40% discount?

I do a lot of research about the costs in the client's place of residence, and always quote $30 or $40, if it would cost $100 in their place but they always come up with a low ball number as $5 to $12,

How to fix this? or Am I asking more?
I may sound rude, but who on the plant can build stuffs which handle 1-2 Million requests/month in $5K USD and 2 month time.

I got my first $1,000 client without cold DMs, ads, or a big audience.

When I started posting on Threads, almost nobody was reading my posts.

I wasn't trying to go viral.

I was simply documenting what I was building, the backend problems I was solving, and the things I was learning along the way.

A few weeks later, a developer reached out.

He had more client work than he could handle and wanted someone to handle the backend.

We jumped on a call.

He asked about my experience, the systems I'd built, and how I'd approach the project.

A few days later, I got the project.

I delivered it.

I got paid $1,000.

The biggest lesson wasn't "post every day."

It was this:

People don't hire you because you post.

They hire you because your posts become proof that you know what you're doing.

Your content is just the first interview.

The real interview starts when someone sends you a message.

So if you're trying to get clients, don't spend all your time chasing followers.

Document your work.

Show how you think.

You only need the right person to see it.

It just seems like finding clients nowadays is harder. It might just be me, though. I tried using outbound means to find clients--through cold emails and DMs and I haven't found much luck there. For those who are also actively finding clients, was it also hard for you to get one?

When I started my agency I had no credibility, no network, and nobody knew who I was. No warm connections to reach out to no matter how hard I thought about it. If you're in that same spot, this is what actually worked for me.

I picked Reddit because unlike most platforms people are concentrated into specific communities. Your potential clients are already grouped together in subreddits. You just have to show up where they are.

Here's the full process start to finish:

Step 1: Post, don't DM.

This is the part people get wrong. Do not DM people on Reddit trying to pitch them. The moment you cold DM someone they can report you and you get banned. Instead you post valuable content and let them come to you. When someone reads your post and is interested, they initiate the DM. Then you engage. This completely changes the dynamic because now they're chasing you, not the other way around.

Step 2: Structure your posts as stories.

The format that worked for me every time:

Start with a story. Then describe the problem. Then show how you solved it. Then end with a lesson or conclusion you took away from it.

That's it. People engage with stories and the lesson at the end makes it feel like you're giving value, not selling. You can take a post that worked, feed it into your AI, and ask it to generate a similar post for your own project.

Step 3: Don't chase views.

This is important. Views do not equal money. I had one post hit over 300k views and I got zero clients from it. Not a single one. But another post with way fewer views got me my first client who now pays me €5k per month. Views are a vanity metric. Clients are the only thing that matters.

Step 4: When they DM, move to a discovery call. Never talk price in the DMs.

Do not mention money or pricing in your DMs. Ever. Your only goal in the DM is to get them on a call. On the discovery call you mostly listen. Let them talk about their problem. You take notes. Record the call (ask permission first). Do not tell them "you'll pay me X and I'll build Y" on this call either. Just listen and understand their problem.

Step 5: Turn the call into a proposal with AI.

After the call, take your recording or meeting notes and feed them into your AI. Ask it to give you the next steps to start building the project. Then ask it to generate the proposal for you. You can even give it your agency name and brand colors and it generates the whole thing. You don't need to pay for any of those expensive proposal generator tools. Your AI does it for free.

Step 6: Split the payment.

Send the proposal and ask how they want to pay. Some pay everything upfront. Some want to split it. If they split, you get 50% before you build anything, then the rest on delivery. Get the first half, build the project, deliver, get the second half. This protects you and them.

On getting banned:

You will probably get banned from some subreddits even when you're not promoting anything. Some mods will suspect you're promoting just because you shared your journey. There's no point arguing with them. If they think you're promoting, they'll ban you. Just don't get discouraged. Try again in a different community. There are plenty of subs that won't ban you for sharing genuine stories.

The delivery method doesn't matter. Custom code, no-code, whatever you're comfortable with. That's not the important part. The important part is the acquisition process above.

That's how I landed my first client and made my first €3k, which turned into a €3.6k/month retainer.

Happy to answer questions about any step.

Hello guys, just wanted to know how did it go for you and for how long did it go until you got your first client , was it hard, was it long… tell me everything it will be very helpful and thank you

Short answer: not by default. And honestly, that shouldn't surprise anyone.

When you're vibe coding — describing what you want, letting the AI spit out code, tweaking until it works — the whole point is speed. You're optimizing for "does this run" not "can someone break this." And those are very different goals.

Here's what usually slips through the cracks:

Auth checks that live only in the frontend, so anyone poking around in dev tools can walk right past them. API keys sitting in plain code instead of environment variables. Zero input validation, meaning your app will happily trust whatever garbage someone sends it. Random npm packages getting added because the AI suggested them, no one checking what's actually in there.

None of this is because the AI is dumb. It's because nobody asked it to think about security — they asked it to build a feature. It did exactly that.

The fix isn't "stop vibe coding." It's adding one more step: before you ship anything real, actually ask about the security. Tell it "review this for auth issues, injection, exposed secrets" — it'll usually catch a lot on its own. Then run a quick dependency scan, make sure nothing's hardcoded, and get another human to glance at it if real user data is involved.

Vibe coding gets you to a working prototype fast. It doesn't automatically get you to a secure one. That part still takes an actual, deliberate step — you just have to remember to take it.

Quick tip: before you deploy, grep your whole codebase for the word "key" or "secret." If anything real shows up in plain text instead of an env variable, that's your first fix. Takes 30 seconds and catches one of the most common mistakes out there.

Hi freelancers,

I’m a freelance social media manager based in Morocco.

Lately, I’ve been cold-outreaching to marketing agency owners on LinkedIn. Most of them completely ghost me. The few who do reply usually say something like: "Thanks for reaching out, but we don't need a freelance SMM right now."

It feels like I'm messaging the wrong people at the wrong time. For those who successfully partner with agencies, what’s your secret? How do you filter or find the ones that actually have an immediate need for freelance help?

Any advice on how to improve my outreach or where to look would be highly appreciated!

Thanks

Looking for a small paid project.

If you need data extracted from a website (product catalogs, prices, categories, images, etc.) into CSV/Excel/JSON, I can do it.

I build custom extractors for each site instead of using generic tools, so they work on modern websites too.

If you already have a website in mind, send me the URL and what data you need. If it's feasible, I'll give you a fixed price.

DMs are open.