I have been freelancing both as a Front-end Developer and Web Designer for the past 5 months now. After having worked with 8 clients, (Not bad, i guess?) there is a single realization that I have come to realize:

The cheaper the client, the higher and more unrealistic their expectations.

I tend to call it "Cheap Client Effect"

I honestly do not know why this happens. As far as I am concerned, when someone invests real money into a project, they tend to respect the process. They communicate clearly, trust your judgment, and understand that quality takes time. But when someone comes in with the bare minimum budget, SOMETHING SHIFTS! I do not know what that thing is but they start acting like they owed everything.

Recently, for example, I worked with a client who wanted me to built a e-commerce store for his sporting brand. He wanted OTP based auth, automatic invoicing, and all the backend features that usually cost $10k. And guess what was his budget, only $100. I mean, how can someone expect everything in this low price. And on top of that, he was telling me: "Either you do it in this scope or leave it, don't lecture me". I was just trying to tell him the reality about this and without understanding, he flipped me off.

Perhaps it is because a lot of the cheap clients rarely understand what the work actually involves. They tend to only see the end product, not the hours of work put behind it.

And that was not a one-time thing. It happened more than once.

A few months ago, a client came to me asking to make him a landing page for his education center. His budget was 30$. I said yes, and made him one. The website turned out great! The UI was awesome and I even had added a telegram bot that sends messages when the form is submitted. But... he kept saying that it looked bad and even compared it to a sloppy vibe-coded website that was made within like 10 minutes. Seriously? Comparing my work to sloppy website was really offensive. So, I just made him a sloppy website just like he wanted within 15 minutes and got my money.

There was even a time when I had made a website for the other client for free and he insisted that I would get him .com domain. I explained that it costed money, but he insisted, saying "But you said that you would do it for free?"

On the other hand, there was a time when I made a portfolio website for a filmmaker for 500$. (it was just a simple website btw. Nothing crazy) And he was so amenable. He just told me to tweak some stuff and that was it.

So now, after all these experiences, I set high prices for my work. Not because I think I am a senior developer, and nor out of arrogance. But as a filter. A higher price attracts the kind of client who already understands what work is worth. And yeah, I have lost some clients because of this...

I would rather work with one respectful & compliant client than with ten "injiq" ones.