I'm in New York, everything is expensive so I thought it was pretty reasonable. For example, one job I gave an estimate on, would easily be a 100 hour job. So I gave an estimate of $5000. They wrote back to me and said they got another offer for $1500.

I'll defintely try raising my price.

Any thoughts on good places to look for work. I have been primarily using Craigslist. I've been getting a good amount of replies. I do not like the sites that make you bid for the work. Seems like that requires a lot of effort, for low prices.

Craigslist is practically the bottom of the barrel for freelancing.

There's a ton of other services and non-traditional sources including tech blogs like Techcrunch and GigaOm (sounds nuts, but biz people go through them).

In NYC, $50 is definitely too low, I think. Of course you didn't say what it is you're doing (reworking PHP scripts, or writing financial models in OCaml, or whatever), which makes a difference too.

i'm curious, what kind of software are you developing / what kind of companies are you serving as a freelancer?

Mostly PHP using CakePHP and some Python.