Navigating the Challenges of Freelance Web Development: Seeking Insights and Support
As a freelance web developer with over five years of experience, I often find myself reflecting on the process of building websites. Despite delivering numerous client projects, mostly in marketing and informational niches, I rarely feel fully satisfied with my workflow or outcomes. At times, the frustration can be overwhelming enough to make me consider throwing in the towel altogether.
The constantly evolving landscape of modern web development can be particularly taxing, especially when working independently. Rising hosting costs, unpredictable tier changes, overage fees, and the complexities of DevOps and tooling best practices all contribute to a sense of ongoing struggle.
To better understand and perhaps alleviate some of these challenges, I’d like to share some specific experiences:
Exploring CMS Options and Their Pitfalls
I experimented with Sanity as a headless CMS. It initially worked well, but scaling to accommodate more users introduced extra charges that caught me off guard. I had tried to avoid variable costs by proposing a fixed annual hosting fee for clients. However, once usage increased, increased billing became inevitable, requiring me to explain additional expenses to clients—a situation far from ideal.
Tinkering with Payload CMS
In an effort to escape the “SaaS tax,” I’ve been working with Payload CMS combined with Astro, hosting everything on DigitalOcean. After weeks of troubleshooting deployment issues, I finally managed to get it up and running across two domains (example.com and admin.example.com). Yet, once I delved into front-end development, I encountered new hurdles—lacking a CDN for image rendering like Sanity provides, difficulties rendering rich text content, and challenges in type safety and data fetching. These obstacles have fueled my need for advice and shared experiences.
The Rapidly Changing Toolset
The ecosystem of web development tools continues to evolve swiftly. I started with Gatsby, which was fantastic—until it wasn’t. Then Next.js rose to prominence, but now its complexity and caching strategies feel overwhelming. Currently experimenting with Astro, I appreciate its simplicity, but I worry about the potential instability of shifting between different stacks as the field evolves.
Hosting Woes
Platforms like Vercel and Netlify offer convenience, but pricing them for client projects can be challenging—especially when explaining that services like Sanity and hosting providers are separate entities. I’ve
