Navigating the Challenges of Freelance Web Development: A Personal Reflection

As a seasoned freelance web developer with over five years of experience, I often find myself questioning the efficacy of my website-building approach. Despite having crafted numerous client websites—primarily for marketing and informational purposes—I haven’t yet achieved the sense of satisfaction I seek in my process.

The rapidly evolving landscape of modern web development presents significant hurdles, especially for freelancers juggling multiple responsibilities. Rising hosting costs, unforeseen tier-based charges, overage fees, and the complexities of DevOps tasks all contribute to this ongoing challenge. Additionally, keeping up with best practices and tooling updates can feel overwhelming.

To provide some clarity, here are the key issues I’ve encountered along the way:

1. Challenges with SaaS CMS Platforms
   I initially experimented with Sanity, which offered great features. However, as client needs grew—specifically with increased user counts—the associated costs surged unexpectedly. I had envisioned a straightforward yearly flat fee for hosting, but soon I had to inform clients about additional charges due to bandwidth spikes and similar issues.

2. Exploring Self-Hosted Content Management Solutions
   I then turned to Payload CMS, self-hosted in combination with Astro, hoping to avoid the “SaaS tax.” After weeks of troubleshooting deployment challenges—particularly integrating with cloud services like DigitalOcean—I finally got a workable setup. However, developing the frontend revealed new issues: lack of a reliable CDN for image delivery, difficulties rendering lexical content into HTML, challenges with typing Payload data without access to the type definitions, and complex data-fetching mechanisms in the absence of a native local API. These hurdles have left me feeling stuck and in need of advice.

3. The Rapidly Changing Tooling Landscape
   The ecosystem is constantly shifting. I started with Gatsby, which I loved—until it became less manageable. Next.js took over, but now I find it increasingly bloated and complex, especially with caching and performance optimizations. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Astro, which I genuinely like, but I worry about jumping between different stacks and losing momentum.

4. Hosting Woes and Cost Management
   Platforms like Vercel and Netlify are convenient, but explaining to clients that they involve multiple separate services can be complicated. DigitalOcean offers more control but requires sysadmin skills—something I haven’t fully mastered. Spending hours executing copy-pasted commands makes me question whether I’m focusing on what I do best