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 grappling with the ongoing quest for improvement and satisfaction in my craft. Despite having successfully delivered numerous client websites—primarily marketing and informational pages—I still struggle with feeling truly content with my development process. If you’re a freelancer in the same boat, you know how complex and sometimes overwhelming the landscape can be.

The modern web development ecosystem is a rapidly evolving maze that presents unique hurdles, especially for independent professionals managing multiple responsibilities. Increasing hosting expenses, unexpected fees associated with tier changes, the complexities of DevOps, and staying current with best tooling practices can sometimes feel daunting.

Here are some of the recurring challenges I’ve faced over the years:

1. Balancing Cost and Functionality with CMS Solutions
I experimented with Sanity, which initially served my needs well. However, as client demands grew—more users, increased data—costs suddenly escalated due to tier-based charges. I started with a simple model of flat yearly hosting fees, but fluctuations in bandwidth or usage required me to re-explain additional costs to clients, complicating billing.

2. Self-Hosting and Custom CMS Setups
To avoid SaaS price hikes, I ventured into using Payload CMS alongside Astro, hosting everything on platforms like DigitalOcean. Despite spending weeks troubleshooting deployment issues, I finally got a setup that functions across multiple domains (e.g., example.com and admin.example.com). However, front-end development introduced new hurdles: integrating image delivery without a CDN like Sanity’s, rendering complex content reliably, managing data types effectively without direct access to Payload’s type files, and handling data fetching via local APIs—all of which continue to challenge my workflow.

3. The Ever-Changing Tooling Landscape
The shift from frameworks like Gatsby to Next.js and now exploring Astro has been both invigorating and frustrating. The rapid evolution means I constantly need to adapt, but I worry about ‘leapfrogging’ between stacks, never settling into a reliable rhythm.

4. Hosting and Deployment Dilemmas
Platforms like Vercel and Netlify are user-friendly, yet pricing for client projects can become complicated—especially when explaining how multiple services (e.g., Sanity plus