How Offering Value-added Services Can Boost a Freelance Developer's Income
Table of contents
· Email configuration and design
· Reseller hosting
· Creating landing pages
· Social media management
· Website maintenance
According to Glassdoor, a freelance software developer's estimated total pay is $128,240 per year, with the base annual salary amounting to $102,445 on average in 2025. These numbers represent the midpoint of the ranges based on salaries collected from platform users and the proprietary Total Pay Estimate model. The estimated additional income is $25,796 annually. Commission, cash bonus, profit sharing, and tips account for the extra amount.
If you want to earn even more, value-added services like website maintenance, marketing automation, social media management, or reseller hosting can provide an opportunity. It's worth pointing out that the probability of selling to a new customer is 20% max, and to an existing customer—60-70%.
Developers should charge a premium based on the value they deliver to clients whenever they provide them with a way to make more money or free up time. They have a trust-based relationship with the client because they are already working for them as developers. The client is likelier to listen to the developer than someone they don't know.
Email configuration and design
Email is still the most effective method of driving online sales. 69% of US internet users state that email is their preferred communication method, and 73% of marketers confirm that email is crucial to their business. With such data, convincing clients of the importance of email marketing shouldn't be too difficult.Responsibilities might include creating email templates, managing and segregating lists, creating content and images, setting up and creating campaigns, reporting, life cycle marketing, and more. It's harder to create an effective email marketing campaign than it appears. Your client could save hours of work even if all you offer is the initial design and setup for a fixed sum.
Reseller hosting
You can customize reseller hosting plans and sell them to earn extra income. If you know designers, that's a bonus. Going with a managed service can be a good idea, though. If not, you run the risk of spending a lot of time dealing with system administrator problems. With managed hosting, you only need to work on the website.You can also boost your earnings with a maintenance retainer. The monthly retainer to host websites can go up to $2,000. At the same time, the monthly cost of running AWS per client is a few hundred dollars, which is a significant profit. It's a good gig as long as you have the skills and resilience to handle it. Clients are sold on things like failover, disaster recovery, and replication.
Creating landing pages
Landing pages remain a focal point for many businesses. Companies with five or fewer landing pages generate 12 times fewer leads than companies with 40+ landing pages. Custom options are appealing even though several SaaS options would enable clients to build their own landing pages. Your prospects improve if you offer a flat rate instead of the monthly plans typical of SaaS options.
Social media management
Many businesses assume social media are a sales channel. They dismiss them as ineffective when they don't get the results they want in a relatively short time. Freelance developers can offer ongoing social media management to businesses that don't have the skills or staff to manage social campaigns. According to HubSpot, more than half (59%) of marketers use social media for at least six hours a week. Even if you spend three hours, it's still a good opportunity for social media management on a retainer. If you like social media, it will be a nice break from coding.
Website maintenance
Providing ongoing website maintenance is an obvious value-added service for a developer to offer. For instance, 63.47% of WordPress sites are running the latest version. As of 2024, there were 810 million WordPress websites online. This means at least 225 million are not running the latest version.Ongoing WordPress website maintenance can include updating plugins, monthly reporting, managing back-ups, publishing and formatting blog posts, and other minor updates and fixes. Developers offer these services based on an hourly fee or on a basic monthly retainer.
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