Freelance developers are self-employed devs who work with several clients on various projects. They set their requirements for each job, such as their work and payment rates. Freelancers often complete projects for companies that cannot hire full-time developers or need such few projects to justify hiring a developer on their staff.
Freelance developers are highly sought-after for their skills and expertise. Some of the many benefits of freelancing in this field are
- flexibility in working conditions,
- endless opportunities, and
- freedom to choose what projects to work on
There are also challenges associated with freelancing. We will look into two common challenges freelancers face: time and cost saving.
Time constraints
Frequently, freelancers work on multiple projects in different domains. As these projects usually have tight deadlines, many freelancers end up working overtime or odd hours to meet their customers’ needs. According to a freelancer survey by Freelancermap, managing time effectively is one of the top challenges for freelancers. Fiverr, a major global freelancer hub, has also stated that time management poses a major challenge to freelancers.
When freelance developers work on several projects, they'll likely use different tools for various projects depending on the tech stack that satisfies the project's requirements, leading to wasted time when alternating between projects. For example, project A involves developing an e-commerce application using React and Golang, whereas project B involves building a weather application using Vue.js and C#. Switching between these projects involves contending with different configurations, especially for the backend services. This alternating takes a lot of time and can lead to difficulties meeting deadlines, and other parts of the freelance developer's life might suffer.
Cost challenges
The costs involved with being a freelance developer tend to grow pretty fast. Some assume that all that is needed to be a freelancer is a working laptop and an internet connection. This assumption is misleading because once the clientele grows and work becomes more demanding, it takes more than a couple of dollars to get things off the ground.
Some of the common expenditures for freelance developers are:
- Hosting and development: This is an overlooked cost, and if a freelancer is looking at scaling, this cost increases rapidly. Once there are many projects, they may find that their current computing equipment also needs an upgrade. This leads to an increasing cost. Also, the cost of hosting web applications grows as the number of projects increases.
- Cloud infrastructure: This is another expense for freelancers. Even with the many cloud services out there, the costs of these services have the potential to grow exponentially with the increasing number of clients and projects.
- Security: The security of an application is a major concern for freelancers and has to be handled to offer a secure application to their clients. This involves handling patches, updates, and vulnerabilities alone, which can take time away from the already limited time to develop and maintain applications.
Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) as a solution for freelance developers
Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a cloud computing concept that enables the server-side of applications to connect with cloud storage and other functions through SDKs and APIs.
BaaS has made it easy for developers to focus more on the core operations of the application while BaaS vendors take care of the server-side tasks.
There are several BaaS providers out there, some of which include:
- Appwrite
- Firebase
- Supabase
- AWS Amplify
- NHost
Each of these providers provides the following common services:
- Authentication
- Databases
- Storage
- Functions
- Security
Freelancers can use these services to enhance productivity and save time and costs. In this article, we will be exploring Appwrite Cloud in more detail.
What is Appwrite Cloud?
Appwrite is an open-source BaaS platform that provides developers with all the core APIs to build web, mobile, and flutter applications. Appwrite can be integrated directly with a client app or used behind or alongside a custom backend.
Appwrite Cloud is an extension of the open-source version of Appwrite. It comes with all the services included in the open-source version but now with fully managed service and minimum friction. Appwrite Cloud contains many features and benefits that will enhance the development workflow of freelancers. Sign up here.
Some of the features of Appwrite Cloud include the following:
- A fully managed backend infrastructure: Developers can self-host their applications, which can take time and money. There are a lot of factors to be considered in self-hosting, some of which are the configuration of the machines and the security and protection of the self-hosting infrastructure. Appwrite Cloud handles all these tasks; thus, the developer can focus on building applications and saving time and money.
- Auto-scaling: This is a very important benefit Appwrite Cloud offers to developers. As traffic grows, there is the need to autoscale the application to accommodate the traffic. It can be quite expensive and time-consuming for developers to handle auto-scaling themselves. Although many cloud options exist, Appwrite Cloud offers a very affordable solution. Appwrite Cloud was designed to scale horizontally, automatically adding more computing and storage when load increases.
- Seamless integration: Appwrite Cloud integrates with popular programming languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Kotlin, PHP, and C#, allowing developers to choose the programming language that satisfies their project requirements. Integrating Appwrite Cloud into an application is a seamless process with the SDKs. This helps the freelancer have one point of integration instead of using several cloud providers for different projects, which costs more.
How can freelance developers benefit from Appwrite Cloud?
Appwrite Cloud offers numerous benefits to Freelance developers. The benefits offered will be subdivided into four categories which include:
- Time efficiency
- Cost savings
- Productivity gains
- Security and reliability benefits
We will be looking at each of these benefits in more detail.
Time efficiency
Appwrite Cloud helps Freelance developers to manage their time efficiently by handling some of the time-consuming parts of the development process. Appwrite Cloud does this by providing the following:
- A streamlined development process: App development is complex and time-consuming. It is an ever-evolving, iterative, and time-consuming process. However, Appwrite Cloud solves this problem as the freelance developer can use Appwrite’s SDKs. The development across platforms with the same backend infrastructure is seamless using Appwrite Cloud, reducing development time, minimizing errors and bugs, and improving the app’s quality.
- A scalable service platform for mobile applications: Appwrite Cloud auto-scales as users of a mobile application increase without compromising performance. The developer does not need extra time to figure out how to auto-scale the application.
Cost savings
Freelance developers can save costs by adopting Appwrite Cloud, which provides the following features:
- A low-cost solution for project requirements: Changing project requirements leads to increased costs, affecting a freelance developer's budget. However, Appwrite Cloud provides a low-cost solution that adapts to changing project requirements. This can help freelancers save costs.
- Open source project to minimize development costs: Appwrite Cloud is an open-source end-to-end BaaS. The development costs are shared, so freelance developers pay only a little of the total costs.
Productivity gains
Appwrite Cloud improves the productivity of freelance developers since they can focus solely on developing applications rather than handling the infrastructure. Some of the ways Appwrite Cloud helps to increase the productivity of freelancers include:
- Real-time functionality: Appwrite Cloud provides real-time functionality that enhances freelance devs’ productivity. When there are modifications to Appwrite Cloud functionality, like updating the database, the changes are reflected in the frontend application in real time. This article demonstrates how Appwrite Cloud provides real-time data sync.
- Using an expert or community of developers: Appwrite has a very active community of developers. There is an active Discord channel and GitHub. They provide answers to questions a freelance developer might have, and this saves time and increases productivity.
Security and reliability benefits
Appwrite Cloud ships with security features like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules, SSL, encryption, rate, and abuse limits.
DDoS is a cyber attack that overloads a network resource or website by flooding it with malicious traffic and making it inoperable. This is a common security issue faced by freelance developers. Appwrite Cloud protects developers from this malicious attack.
Web Application Firewall protects web applications from attacks via HTTP.
As a BaaS, Appwrite Cloud protects the backend APIs that are being called by the frontend application from malicious attacks. This ensures data integrity, security, and reliability.
Conclusion
This article discussed the time- and cost-saving challenges freelance developers face. We also explored the benefits Appwrite Cloud provides to freelance developers to overcome the challenges mentioned and help them save time and earn more.
To sign up on Appwrite Cloud, follow this link.
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