When I think of freelancers, I think of 3 tiers: 1: the bottom of the barrel. They will beg for anything you give them and will do it for $5, or even show you a free demo (by building out part of the project, or designing it) They will bid on every project on Upwork. My guess is 80% of Upwork falls into this category. 2: Freelancer who charges a mid-range or "market rate" or even above market rate. They can't fathom that they are worth double what they are charging. 3: The highly paid freelancer - the person who decided to double their rates and "capped out" at some high rate. This person thinks he can't go any higher, he tried, but it wasn't working. Sometimes they do really well.. like a developer charging top rate and putting in 8 hours a day or whatever realistic amount of time developers work. This freelancer can make above market salary and some are perfectly fine with it.

Then there is the consultant. The person who realized that time does not equal money, that businesses pay for value, or more importantly, they want to know how much money this is going to save/make them. The consultant charges for value, at a markup. The top of the ladder make over a mil a year, the ones still learning can make very good sums of money, but its all limited by them. If they don't do the work, the money stops. This is a great place to be, but you quickly learn that you don't want to be stuck here, unless you are the top tier consultant and you love your work and don't mind the day in day out. I have not heard of too many of these, but they usually turn into product businesses well before reaching that.

If there is one thing any aspiring freelancer needs to know is that their mind is their worst enemy. Overcome your mind and you can go a lot further. I was and still am a victim of my own mind and work on overcoming it.

Not sure about the OP, but to me... The freelancer is building product on their own, or mostly so. Somebody hires them to do the majority of the project. "Hi, I need a website that does X, here's $20k to build it."

The consultant is embedded in an existing team and either building some niche portion of the product OR providing some sort of training. "Hi, I need a website that does X, we're only qualified to build subset Y, here's $20k to build the remained OR train us to build the remainder."