If you only have 2 years experience, especially if that experience is limited to your job, you might not be as ready to move forward as you think you are. I recommend first proving to yourself that you can do what others cannot before taking risks that will limit your ability to become a stronger and more competent craftsman.

How do you generate income - income enough to survive?

- rifd 1/23 after 13 yrs - 25 yrs exp

I recommend going to some meetups and meeting other solo founders/creators. I recently went to a Microconf meetup (https://microconf.com/) and met 30-40 other solo creators and had a blast.

I would pick Ruby on Rails as main framework. It can go a long away, has sane defaults when talking about security and can move fast with building features.

For CRUD is the perfect fit (for me).

For background processing job I would pick Sidekiq or GoodJob

And would add to it a library like Avo - a good admin that will remove for me the need to create my own backoffice dashboard.

If I would have more time to put aside for learning something new I would try Hanami 2: it is Ruby but it comes with a different code architecture for a web app.

Don't lowball your consulting rate!

* Your price sends a signal that attracts particular clients, and the ones you attract with lowball prices are the worst, most demanding kind.

* Your ordinary good clients aren't shopping on price, beyond a vague notion of what the normal range of prices for your field is. Remember: they're generally not spending their own money.

* Any client big enough to have a purchasing department is never going to let you get your rate back; their whole job is to prevent vendors from ever raising rates.

* There are a zillion things you're selling as a consultant that you don't realize you're selling, from schedule flexibility and freedom to fire at will to answering phone calls about the project deliverable 3 weeks after the project is done to not having to pay benefits and payroll taxes to documentation, and you're much more likely to forget to capture this stuff in your prices than you are to overcapture it.

I'm not sure I've ever met a new consultant that had unrealistically high rates. But most new consultants I've met have had unrealistically low rates.

If a client balks at your rate, you can still get the project cost where they need it to be: negotiate on scope instead of rate.

Never bill hourly. Hourly is cursed.