If you're a contractor, your best bet is to focus on an industry to understand the needs of that industry better. Rather being a Python developer, you can be a contractor who builds usable solutions that happen to use Python.
Industry knowledge, referrals, good prior work and marketing are important. These $150/hr jobs won't fall into your lap unless you put an effort to position your lap that way :)
As much as we like to think technology is a meritocracy, at the end of the day, it always comes down to who you know. The charitable interpretation of that fact is that there aren't a lot of ways to gauge reputation, so it's mostly about who can vouch for you.
Source: I co-founded a software and design consultancy co-op (https://www.fountstudio.com/about).
In NYC and SF, you'd never fill your contract if you were trying to pay < 150.
For bigger multi month projects i would come down quite a bit, but for small ones i wouldn't budge.
Its not something you can pull off when new to freelancing and more importantly don't have connections / referrals.
Its a comparable price to what small agencies charge (or charged, haven't been working/living in Switzerland in years).
Almost meaningless to talk about hourly rate without also providing the length of the contract.
For example, if you earned $150,000 as a contractor, but you incurred $30,000 in expenses then you would have $120,000 in potentially taxable income.
The tax code is very, very complex, though, and there isn't a simple answer to this question. There are a vast array of factors that would shift how much you pay in tax up or down, and this complexity is heavily exploited by lots of folks.
So health insurance is a cost ... albeit not the same for everyone, at some companies you pay surprisingly little and that is compensation ON TOP OF your pay...
Other places not.
It's really hard to get good 1:1 comparisons.
Taxes and etc in the US are widely unevenly applied depending on the situation compared to what seem to be 'more' standardized and predictable numbers, services, in Europe.
It’s also very easy to compare even if you are an employee, as health insurance premiums are shown in box 12 code DD of an employee’s W-2. And health insurance premiums don’t vary that much between healthcare.gov and ACA complaint insurance that employers subsidize.
What is clear is that there exists a healthcare expense in life, and so if you are paying for it via taxes in one region, you would have to figure out how much it costs in the other region where it’s not included in taxes to make the comparison more accurate.
You can use this table from the state of NJ to reasonably guess how much healthcare will cost you in a moderately high CoL area in the US:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
As for the differing costs of insurance outside of the freelancer world, I've found the costs in the US can vary wildly. Those tax boxes aren't the only way / shouldn't be the only comparison for US healthcare costs.
Some plans will cover some providers and some won’t, and rural areas will have issues with even having providers at all, but for most major urban/suburban regions, it should be comparable, +/- 10%, even 20%.
Either way, you know that healthcare costs are in the thousands and $10k+ per year per family, which is a lower bound you can add to calculating US tax rates.
For every $30/hr posting on the net, there is another one for $100. I also personally know of folks who are making +$150 with Django. It really depends on who you work for.
Although you will see a lot more of `build Uber for $5K` type of one off jobs, there are some reputable companies who need more capacity on new projects.
If I were you I would cast a wider net and sample the market more.