This is a beautifully poignant post about life and selling one's time. At 39 I've reached this point where I can verbalise that sentiment whereas before I could only really feel it. Having to sell one's time to others sucks. Doing things on someone else's schedule sucks. And ultimately as the post ended, having the freedom to spend life the way it should be spent means sacrificing that extra bit of money we might want but don't need. Great post.
The net revenue he gets is actually reasonable.
Yeah. Was surprised to see him complain about a 15% business / income tax.
The problem for me is not having to pay that tax. The problem is that we as Romanian citizens never see anything good done with them. And that's why I feel the need to complain.
We're out of communism for more than 30 years but the mentality of officials has barely changed. People are dying in dirty hospitals of infections that they didn't have before getting there (see Colectiv 2015). Analphabetism is higher than in previous years. You will choke and get lung pain if you want to take a walk on the street in most villages because of the coal being burned by poor people.
Education and healthcare are in dire need of money, and we're always on a tight budget and raising taxes.
If the tax rate is so low, it's no surprise there's no money for education and health care - given that Romania isn't Switzerland. Sure there will be corruption but it can't all go to corruption.
but it can't all go to corruption
What makes you think so?
I am puzzled how little people know outside of CEE region. Of course it can. CEE is not high trust society it's been decimated by years of communism and the oligarchy got reinforced with the coming of western european investments.
CEE politicians are crooks that believe cattle (the voters) are to be exploited and they cant compete with the developed world anyway.
3m out of 20m of romanians have left the country and there's no way investments in education and health care would make a dent in this.
see Colectiv 2015
At least 13 of the victims that died in hospitals were killed by bacteria, probably because the disinfectant used was diluted by the manufacturer to save money.
(From Wikipedia.) That's so sad to read, considering they had actually survived the fire.
Btw, Ceausescu was executed on this very day, December 25, thirty-four years ago. I was in the 3rd grade and our very distressed primary school teacher told us that some bad people in Romania have overthrown the Communist Party rule! That was the first political information session I ever was put into, and, luckily, there weren't much more of them later due to the dissolution of the USSR.
As a person from a country similar to Romania, I can empathize with him. When you lose trust in the state and how they spend your money, even a 1% tax is too much.
I think the countries where you actually get your money's worth when it comes to taxes is very small, and even then, it's not clear whether it's due to good policy or merely luck and riding off previous successes that are being eroded by short-sightedness, stupidity/incompetence or corruption (also known as "lobbying" in the West).
I’ve never worked as a consultant but is it reasonable to assume you always have work (8*21 hours) which pays $120 per hour?
I do consulting work sometimes - I cap it at 10hr/month and charge $250/hr. That’s a good way of ensuring random jobs don’t take over your life. And yes; there’s always more work.
No, but estimating being booked 75%+ isn't unreasonable.
Not really, that was a wild extrapolation on my part. But I did have at least 2 other companies waiting for me to be available on other projects, so in my specific case it would have been possible to continue working like that for the full year.
Yes, here in The Netherlands I keep 60% of such income, compared to his 90% after tax.
Yeah. Start a BV (privately owned company) here and the tax calculation is similar, if not worse, in complexity and you get to hand over ~40% of your money... in a country with vastly higher CoL
It should be noted that for Europeans other alternatives exist, as you can freely shop any EU country to incorporate a business. Many of my tech friends have set a company in Estonia for tax planning once they have hit a certain revenue (and 0% corporate income tax).
You will still need to pay taxes once you take any money out of that company; whether it's payroll tax or capital gains tax. And there's also health insurance and pensions insurance.
Romania is basically a tax haven in Europe and he complains.
Poor eastern-European countries cannot compete easily for investments. Bad infrastructure, brain drain, small working population, judicial system, etc. Taxes is one of few things that they can use to attract investors.
The author writes, about his purchases of computers, phones, and other hardware, “These are not recurring so I can't count them in.”
Here in the U.S., many such items would be considered capital assets, for which the cost would be recognized as an expense over time through depreciation, for both management accounting and tax purposes. It appears Romanian practice is similar; see “Depreciation” on this page:
Here in Germany its similar, maybe its could be worth for the author to consult a tax consultant as he may be missing out quite some money. Also a wage you pay yourself is usually better off for tax readons - that's why the maximum wage you can pay yourself as business owner is limited.
Agree about the accountant, they are expensive in some countries, but usually worth it.
Can you elaborate on your last point? For salary you still need to pay >20% income tax + social insurance, and for dividends you still need to pay >20% after you just paid your corporation tax >15%.
I'm curious, why its better to pay yourself more, when your laptop, phone and even food can be covered by the company? (Assuming a single founder company, doing everything legally)
It really depends on the percentages, so I can mainly speak about Germany: For example you have a revenue of 100.000. If you have a limited liability company (UG or GmbH in Germany) you pay 30% taxes on the profit, so you have 70.000 left at the end of the year. If you want to transfer it to your personal account you will need to pay additionaly taxes of 25%. So you are left with 52.500.
If you directly pay yourself 100.000 as wage it is fully deductable as company expense. So you don't pay any company taxes and would only need to pay income taxes of ~25.000.
So a payout as wage you have 75.000 instead of 52.500.
For both values at least in Germany you would also need to pay health insurance and possible for pension. (Health insurance at least additional 8.000 - 10.000).
The best would be probably to let the company cover the PC / tablet / phone costs as they are business expenses and payout yourself the remainer as long as long as you can still increase your business operations.
A good tip I once got was that you should always try to get money out of your company while you can - having it on your personal bank account is better then in your companies one.
The best would be probably to let the company cover the PC / tablet / phone costs as they are business expenses
Depending on how your local tax codes are structured and how strictly your local tax authority interprets them, letting the company buy the electronics and then subsequently using it for non-business use might count as a fringe benefit and therefore be taxable. In other words, if get your company to buy you a iPhone 15 Pro Max and a 16 MBP Pro with M3 Max, but all you're doing is some light macOS app development, they might (rightly) think that those aren't really being used for business purposes and are actually a sneaky way to remunerate yourself.
What is "social insurance"?
Literal translation from a language such as German, French or the like. The right translation would be payroll tax, all sorts of mandatory insurances like health, unemployment, retirement (continental Europe has a few more mandatory items than US)
Ah I see, thanks. I thought it might be the equivalent to our social security tax.
I’m always amazed at other country’s tax systems. Here in NZ if you’re a sole trader you only pay personal income tax, if you incorporate you either take the whole profit as income and pay income tax, or take a dividend which comes with tax credits so you only pay the difference between the company tax already paid and personal income tax. So just taking it all as salary is easier.
Here in Switzerland, dividends are better tax-wise than wage, at least if you own a significant chunk of the company („Qualifizierte Betriligung“).
Anecdotally relevant to employees too: sometimes companies (and even public organizations like universities) let you keep the hardware they buy for you after it meets the 3 years depreciation rule.
Sounds like black hat tax accounting. If it's still worth something after 3 years it would be an in-kind payment which will need to be taxed.
Sounds like black hat tax accounting. If it's still worth something after 3 years it would be an in-kind payment which will need to be taxed.
Not really black hat though: it's extremely common. In many countries there are specific rules as to how much you can deduce: say 33.33% yearly and after three years it's considered to have a residual value of zero or 20% yearly and after five years it's considered 0.
But then: if you play by the rule, by not deducing 100% in a year... After x years it is considered to be worth just that: zero.
So even though "it's still worth something", from an accounting point of view it can be worth zero (depending on the item).
So you can do whatever you want with it even if it's true value is not zero. You can burn it, stash it, give it away for free.
Basically: anything you do with it except specifically sell it is easier from an accounting point of view.
Things get a bit more complicated when you cannot deduce 100% over x years but only, say, 60% over x years. Then the company, logically, is supposed to sell the item (laptop, bicycle, car) for 40% of the residual value to the item.
For example a friend of mine had his company buy him a 10 K EUR bicycle (no kidding) and after x years (don't remember if it was 3 or 4), he bought the bicycle for himself for 2 K EUR.
To add context, it seems like the CoL of Romania is ~45% cheaper than the US [1]. Which seems like would make for a very comfortable lifestyle with that income.
[1] https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states...
Yeah but people’s budgets are not made fully of restaurants and groceries. The bulk is made of housing, cars, phones, goods, clothes, which cost the same as western europe for the most part. In some cases I find food in the UK cheaper. Petrol is also comparable. While far from London the real estate market in a large city is comparable to say Manchester or similar. I doubt people writing apps live in areas where a house costs as much as a house in Detroit’s rundown areas. So op’s expenses are likely higher than that stat.
That seems implausible. I looked it up and the first result was:
A one-room apartment in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Brasov, Sibiu or other big cities will cost from €350 to €500 per month
Good luck finding that in Manchester!
I just found a newly built 7 bedroom villa with pool in Bucharest for under €500k, not ideal as it's near the airport but if anyone could point to an equivalent in the Manchester metropolitan area I'd be very interested.
Also found an entire building on Bucharest's second busiest street Magheru Blvd for €1.4M. Out of my price range unfortunately but it does include 12 separate 3 bedroom apartments, a floor of offices, and a restaurant, cafe and art gallery at street level.
Why go that big? Most people are already happy with 2 rooms and 60 square metres. Those apartments are much cheaper than $500k, at least in Budapest, which is a country away, but still :) Ok, I get it, a big family would be very happy in that villa, bit it's a bit weird to see it as a baseline :)
Indeed, it was just the first one that came up in the search to illustrate the massive difference.
It's about twice the house you'd get for Manchester money. Maybe there's other factors to consider, but the idea that Romanian housing is the same price as the UK's doesn't make much sense to me, and I can't find evidence of it being true.
Also found an entire building on Bucharest's second busiest street Magheru Blvd for €1.4M. Out of my price range unfortunately but it does include 12 separate 3 bedroom apartments, a floor of offices, and a restaurant, cafe and art gallery at street level.
This sounds extremely dubious and I would not take that into account in any relevant real estate price for central Bucharest :)
Rent in Romania is similar to Western Europe? I thought the income levels were very very different.
Renting isnt as much a thing Romania. It’s a bit rare, like ownership in the UK.
Rent and prices for decent quality are similar. I know because I made investments there. Folks here are quoting some rather below par prices, that local usually stay away from _if they seek decent housing_. There are rundown areas, such as that where Tate lives - next to a cemetery - but a few streets further away and prices double. You dont see the upper extremes as in vest europe but for “regular” folks the col is similar.
Also there’s a lot of “under the table” money involved in buying property, so actual prices are way, way, higher than official figures. Typically if you wish to make some _very_ high margins you invest in bucharest or cluj. British expats living there extatic, not just because they could afford to buy (working locally albeit for western companies), but also because they made decent profits if they bought 5-6 years ago.
Housing prices are controlled by local supply & demand; there's no way housing is going to be remotely comparable between let's say the UK and Romania; the majority of properties would stay empty forever if they were priced like in the UK.
Same thing for most consumer goods - they have a (very low) base price and the rest is pure profit margin which is adjusted according to the local purchasing power. Consumer goods in Romania would be much cheaper than in a Western European country; whether by existing manufacturers lowering their profit margins to match local purchasing power, or other manufacturers managing to fill this gap in the market by selling at more affordable prices.
The goods are cheaper but not that much.
Most goods like food and furniture are made by large Western European companies( mostly german and austrian) who utilize economy of scale to make those and can ship and deliver them in large quantities to shops that they THEMSELVES control.
It's impossible for a country like Romania to develop its own champions in a traditional industry like this.
Isn't $5800/month a shit ton of money in Romania? Who even gets paid similar amounts there? He mentions a consulting job, but you don't consult as many hours a month as a salaried person
Yes, it’s a lot of money in Romania. I could live very comfortably if that would continue being the case. If I had my own place.
My “not bad” remark is because I still can’t afford housing with all the money I make. I’ve been living in rent since college >10 years ago and I’m sick of it. You get no legal benefits when renting in Romania, everything is done by hiding from the state and local authorities. So you can’t even get a family doctor in your area.
Me and my wife have been trying to buy a house for the last 4 years and even tried to renovate a 100 year old house in an isolated village because it was all we could afford. Long story but we got scammed, the land plot is unusable in its current state.
Housing prices are so out of control here that even with that consulting money I would still need to not spend anything for a year to be able to afford a house that doesn’t need heavy repairs and has all the paperwork in good order. It’s very common here to sell houses that were built without a permit.
No offense but I think you do not understand how privileged you are.
Offense seems to be the only thing you do around here. I know I’m privileged, I work with unprivileged people to help them get better sometimes and that is probably the best way to feel how much inequality there is between us.
Having a lot of money relative to the place you live in doesn’t guarantee your happiness. Privilege means nothing in the face of illness of a loved one, having to live with parents at 30 because you had to evacuate a rent made without contract and more things I would like to not share on a tech forum..
Please get a sense of what’s being talked around here, what’s the negativity for?
I don't want to be negative and it's great to see what you've accomplished, the problems you are mentioning and alluding to are unfortunately not exclusive to your country, I could share some horror stories too and I come from the "developed and rich" western europe.
The point is that the net income you get is very high for european standars, let alone Romania. With that level of income it is really weird that you cannot solve the problems you have.
The phrase "I would still need to not spend anything for a year to be able to afford a house" is bonkers.
Bonkers it is yet it’s true. The house prices are a joke right now here. I don’t know what drives such prices, 95% of Romanians will never be able to afford a €200k house with 50sqm of paved courtyard in front. Supply and demand my ass…
Believe me, I’m so sick of “calling for details” because everyone hides most useful details in the house ad, then asking if it has paperwork ready which most don’t and expect you to buy the house based on how the house looked 20 years ago before heavy renovations with the cheapest materials possible, then spending numbing hours on trains to get to see that house in real life only to see how many lies were said on the phone and how that house would never be evaluated at more than half its price…
That above is extremely common, I’ve been going through this for the past 4 years and I’m So. Sick. Of. It.
If you think house prices are a joke now, just wait 2-3 years.
I'm actually a structural engineer with a passion for passive houses and went into programming 8 years ago. I designed and built a lot of houses and I know what you're talking about.. the house builders chase profits disregarding any laws.
IMHO the best thing is to buy a lot and build yourself the house, this way you are sure that you get what you want.
To my ears, supply and demand sounds like it makes a lot of sense here. Romania began as a country where most people owned their home, and still is; and it sounds like making the move from owning to renting comes with significant loss of political privileges, like healthcare, apparently. If I didn't speak English and would lose access to healthcare if I sold my house, I probably wouldn't sell it either unless it was absolutely necessary. Hence the supply is low, and when you throw corruption on top of that...
OP, consider moving to a country where renting doesn't turn you into a second class citizen if this really bothers you so much. It's counterintuitive, but you'll probably find the property markets to also be more sane there.
No offense but you seem very uneducated in the matter. Being self employed makes it more difficult for OP to get a loan while "good" real estate is reaching almost western european level of prices in Central & Eastern Europe.
Your post reeks of jealousy for OP's net salary but you fail to account for your accumulated wealth over time of you and your family. OP's had not been earning this wage for years while you and your family has.
OP probably uses a lot of his net salary to support his spouse and family while you dont have to do that.
House prices per sqm in Romania based on average net earnings per month is lower than ever, lower than 2014 when price per sqm were at the lowest after the 2008 financial crisis.
Why don't you consider buying the house with a bank loan? it's the best decision to do so even if you have all the money... if you talk with a financial consultant you'll see why.
Housing prices are not out of control, we are lagging years behind other European countries in regard with house prices. If you look on the numbers you will see that this is actually a good time to buy a house in Romania.
Banks/etc will usually not give you a loan/mortgage if you don't have a local 9-5 job. This is often not an option for freelancers.
The disadvantage of using a Merchant of Record like Paddle is that I don't get to reclaim the VAT at the end of the year. > That's because it's some kind of B2B relation: > I sell them my app in gross with 0% VAT, and then they resell it and collect taxes themselves.
thats confused and wrong. it doesn't matter one bit if the merchant-of-record collects and remits VAT or if you do it yourself. the money ain't yours either way.
what does matter in a big way for small business is VAT liability in the first place. merchants-of-records like Paddle and the various AppStores are basically liable for VAT in every country around the world.
however a small business (like in this example with 100k revenue) is not VAT liable everywhere because VAT thresholds are often much higher. if you sell directly (e.g. via Stripe), you don't have to collect the VAT when selling in most jurisdictions except Europe. so you can either offer the product for 20 percent less and have a more competitive price or increase the price by the VAT and pocket it yourself instead of having to give it to the government of the customer.
if believe this makes a huge difference for small companies but is rarely mentioned.
except Europe
EU, I suppose. What happens when you collect VAT from EU customers? Do you have to transfer to each of EU countries? Is it enforced somehow? What if you don't collect VAT at all? Technically speaking, EU customers buy stuff on your site, not in EU. E.g. they also buy stuff from US Amazon.com and don't pay any VAT. Especially for digital goods - there is no need for an EU delivery address.
European Economic Area to be precise (i.e. Norway, Switzerland etc abide by the same rules). Yes, if you're not a tiny business (OP isn't tiny) you have to pay VAT to each end customer's country. Though you can declare it in your home country to reduce bureaucracy. VAT law is well developed, what matters is the location of the end customer, not where the seller is, so your technically speaking isn't how it works. Wrong, if they buy from US Amazon, they pay VAT at EU customs entry (unless customs misses it or it's below threshold of some 40 EUR or so). Is it enforced? Yes. Do they catch everyone who cheats? No. Do you want to break the law? Better not.
EEA might demand their citizens to pay the VAT, but how can it demand/enforce this e.g. for some company in Vietnam? What happens when EEAians buy goods in Vietnam with EEA bank's credit cards, e.g. in a not-tiny restaurant? Is the VAT cancelled because they are physically in Vietnam for the time being?
I have been in this situation but selling to the States. Nothing happens if you sell to end users who pay with credit card but as soon as you have a large sale to a company or institution they will ask for all kinds of documents that force you to register properly and pay taxes.
Strange, US companies force you to register in US and pay US taxes?
Otherwise, registering in your country is a normal thing.
It depends. Apple pays VAT on your behalf, so you don’t have to do anything.
If, let’s say another service does not do that, you have to pay it your self, but MOSS[1] exist for that, which means that you’ll pay for your local tax agency, and it will distribute VAT payments per country.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...
I assume he means on his expenses. Which is also wrong. You sell taxable items to paddle but since they are outside your jurisdiction you don't charge them taxes. But you can claim taxes on your expenses no problem. At least that is how it works in Canada
The Apple app store is a disaster for making a living as an indie. People can't find the apps so sales are low, market rate prices are also low. The only way to make a living is to rip-off users with misleading subscriptions, which I won't do. I made much more money writing $20 shareware in the 90s.
That's why I write apps for a corporation now.
That’s by design. You are meant to work for a corporation. Capitalism is nearly dead due to this - corporation flooding the market, drowning indie enterprise, and clogging money. We need a return to capitalism and do away with guilded corporatism.
The specific case here is usually referred to as commoditizing the complement, it's probably intentional at this point if it wasn't intentional from the start.
Why not write shareware again?
More users than ever.
There are a bunch of people who make enough money to live on the App Store, even without subscriptions. I'm one of them. I've heard of a few others as well.
There are a lot of things that suck on the App Store, but it's definitely possible to make a living.
The only way to make a living is to rip-off users with misleading subscriptions
(Personal experience/anecdata follows.)
I don't know. I sell a macOS/iOS productivity app on the App Store[1], and while not getting rich there, I can tell you that's actually useful to people, you can put a non-peanuts price tag on it. I love that it's relatively straightforward to get an app out in front of a lot of potential customer.
That said, I wouldn't never rely on the App Store to surface my app on its own, it's ridiculous.
I am surprised there is so much money to be made in such simple applications. Kudos well done
I am quite sure that the author of this post doesn't mean it bad, however, I don't want this post to give people the wrong impression that the money asked is not worth it. Far far far from the truth.
I am learning Swift/swiftUI (as a backend guy with little previous experience with frontend/UI programs, okay) and building apps for OSX can be very painful. Starting from outdated docs (basically no books about OSX development since ... 10-15 years? or more?) to the new fancy ways of doing things with SwiftUI (that sells the promise that "you do it once,..." and it will work exactly as they planned to when you sell *Hello World* apps).
It's not the use case itself to be hard, but the fact you need to support multiple operating systems (which as you might know, Apple produces every year a brand new model, so imagine the fun), or that maybe the specific API you rely on (from Apple, not some random guy out there) has some weird memory leak because it's written in C++ or Obj-C, who knows last time someone touched it. And Apple is updating everything but that specific thing, so you need to build something around it. I don't even want to start on the lack of libraries for Swift - a lot of open source libs are outdated, bugged, last commits 1-2 years ago, which means you either have to fork and fix, or well, you do it yourself from scratch.
Nowadays selling software for OSX has basically nothing to do anymore with the idea or use case itself but all the toil that the poor developer has to put with up. I learnt that most apps on the App Store deserves some money (sometimes they ask for a lot, nothing to say, but that's their business model).
I definitely feel your pain. I get flashbacks of interminable weeks of work where a bug that’s clearly not caused by my code is suddenly affecting a number of users.
Reverse engineering skills have greatly improved the way I develop things on macOS nowadays. Having access to any process memory and variables and being able to alter it using Frida makes it less painful to navigate obscure macOS APIs.
Although if it’s a problem in internal SwiftUI code, I’m afraid nothing can help you.
Thanks for mentioning Frida - I will check it out, eventually.
Reverse engineering skills have greatly improved the way I develop things on macOS nowadays.
I don't even want to know what you have to deal with for your app that handles the brightness of the screen. Monsters are probably less scary :)
Because it is also about marketing and as non-Mac user (Linux) I heard about Lunar many times.
Me too. I’ve made some small Mac apps back in the day that solve some real problems, and I’ve probably only made a thousand dollars or so off of them. (The vast majority from donations for an open source utility, actually.)
A bare metal Hetzner server: $600
Alin, are you ok to share the specs of that server? I'm interested mainly because I'm a server guy and have a bunch of stuff at Hetzner, but nothing (yet) big enough to be US$600 for a single server. :)
(Not OP)
The cheapest are €44.76/month so that's already ~$600 (if you want your server to be located in germany you are already at minimum €51.36/month which would be ~$680)
But you can get better bang for buck on the "serverbörse"/server auction. (That's what I'm currently renting)
But if you want to have large storage while also using RAID + a decent amount of RAM you'll still get to the ~$600 per year pretty easily.
I don't know what you have at hetzner, maybe you are thinking about VPS?
EDIT: ah okay, you thought it was $600/month?
EDIT: ah okay, you thought it was $600/month?
Yeah, complete brain-o on my part.
We have several dedicated servers with Hetzner, but nothing like a $600/month one. :)
Gotcha, that would've been very interesting
But currently there is one server at the auction for €600, so there are definitely some people using Hetzner who spend that kind of money for one server haha
There is no way to share a direct link to it, but these are the specs:
CPU:
AMD EPYC 7401P
RAM:
16x RAM 32768 MB DDR4 ECC reg.
(so 512GB total)
DISKS:
2x SSD U.2 NVMe 960 GB Datacenter
4x SSD SATA 3,84 TB Datacenter
The entire article is discussing annualized numbers, so $50/month, a fairly middling Hetzner server.
Thanks, very good point. Completely didn't realise that. :)
I am a paying customer and regular user of Lunar and Rcmd (for which I might have paid more than 12 bucks, just sayin) and I am pretty sure I saw Clop on Setapp and was thinking of trying it. I’m glad to have the opportunity to give feedback: your app and website design aesthetic really makes you stand out from most of the “popular Mac app” authors (you know who you are), which have a very much Web1.0 look and feel (and many of these rockstars have been writing for the platform that long). I look forward to whatever comes next, and I always poke around when I see one of your links hit Reddit or wherever.
Thank you! Wow, that’s.. I’m glad to read all that. Warms my heart.
I just browsed the article, and missed you make Lunar until this comment.
Fantastic work. Absolutely critical for taming the weirdness of my LG 5K display.
I've been trying to get my LG 5K display to turn on from macOS for like 2 months now. I just downloaded Lunar to try and fix the problem, but nada. I know the monitor works because if I connect an iPad with the same cable, the display works fine. What's your trick?
That's a pretty good job. This may have been answered and I didn't see it, but how long did it take to get up to that level?
Author here! It's a tricky question to answer. I wrote Lunar v1 in 2017, and it was fully free for 4 years, but those years were essential for the app to mature and get a good following.
In June 2021 I launched Lunar v4 with the new support for Apple Silicon and I also added a paid tier. I started making good money from the start, most likely because Lunar was already "known". I was making about $3k/month back then, which was enough for me to not need a full time job anymore.
Getting to $6k was a gradual process since 2021 until now: constantly launching free apps, giving more attention to those that provided utility to most people, adding paid tiers when I had enough to offer over the existing free features.
How do you plan what features should be added while the app is free, and then which features in the future will go into a paid tier?
Last year I worked on a pet project iOS app (which I never released unfortunately) and one of my struggles was figuring out how I'd portion out the features from free to not-free after release. I was thinking at the time of doing what you've done, basically releasing as free for a while and then adding a paid set of features. It's just difficult to plan what should fit there.
If I want to build a feature that I know would need a lot of work so I’d like to make it paid, I note it down. That’s it, I just leave it there, and focus on getting the app launched as free first.
After the launch, feedback will guide you through what noted features to act on, and even add some more.
Launching it as free also gives you time to iron out the inevitable edge cases that won’t appear in your tests. People will have lower expectations, and feedback will contain less angry tone, which is usually a big demotivator.
The “launch early” phrase you keep reading in maker circles, makes a lot of sense for indie devs. It’s easiest to validate an idea, and get help on the direction of the app. Your idea of what the app should be is not always the best idea, user feedback can help fine tune that.
However if you have a very specific vision, and “if someone pays, good, if no one pays, still good”, then disregard what I said above. Keep working on your vision, something unique might sprout out of that.
EDIT: I realized I might not have answered your actual question. Because I always build apps to fix a problem of my own, I make free only what’s essential for that problem. Like what I would do in a script, but with just a bit of polish and UI for it to be usable by non tech users as well.
That’s how Clop launched: first it was a single Swift file that checked the clipboard for images in a loop and ran pngquant on them. I would run that at the command line. Then I packaged it as an app with minimal UI and released it as free.
Most of everything else will be paid. That’s what happened with video and PDF optimization on Clop.
But if it’s an improvement on an existing free feature, I will add it for free. That’s what I did with ignoring specific types of images from the clipboard, or detecting Universal Clipboard etc.
I'm really curious how you found that MacOS consulting work. I have been battling MacOS build problems for years and so agree it is a rare and important skill. But I've yet to find the right place to sell that skill.
I was tasked with packaging an app so that it would run as a root LaunchDaemon. So a bit of launchd config work, a bit of pkg install scripts, weird workarounds in code for having the “daemon app” run in the login session of any user.
It needed a bit of sleuthing which I liked, it’s the other non-code stuff that I disliked.
Oh I realized now that you probably meant how I found, as in searched for the job, not how I liked it. Well I had a small button in the middle of the front page of “The low-tech guys” that lead to this page: https://lowtechguys.com/business
The copy is different now as I wanted to take another stab at helping my friend get into consulting. He just had his second child recently so we stopped that idea.
That's great. An inbound lead, it sounds like. Nice looking page! Really appreciate the follow-up.
Congrats for knowing what's important to you (time and peace of mind, from what I read), and acting on it.
I work as a consultant, but for the same reasons: I choose to work only a few days a week, take the salary loss, and spend more time with my young kids. A time will come where I'll start working more, which will also unlock more meaningful work – but for now that's a choice I'm happy to make.
Thanks! And happy to hear you're doing that!
I also asked for a 3-day work week from my last company when I wanted to try and make Lunar paid. It's incredible how much your life changes when you're not defined by your job anymore.
Because you spend more time (4 days) doing some other thing than your job (3 days), you really start seeing what's actually important, and the question "what's your job" no longer has a straightforward answer.
This ^^. What we call "work" gets totally redefined in later years. That flip makes you realise, you are not your job and your job is just a means to an end.
I have so much respect for people who know what they want and can execute on it, despite the financial implications of doing so in cases where it carries financial risk. It inspires others to clearly know one’s self-worth, desires, and agency.
But I could not fit into the same old Slack chat + Zoom meetings + SCRUM + daily report + doing something that you feel it has no purpose in the real world for 8 hours a day madness that consulting work needs. So I said "no, I'm sorry, I'd like to continue building my apps".
It's strange that I have the opposite feeling while consulting.
I work for a "big tech" company and do consulting work on the side, and it's the former that has all of the Slack/Zoom/Agile/meaningless nonsense -- with consulting I feel as though I'm actually solving a problem for a business in a meaningful way.
I guess all consulting gigs aren't created equal - I guess I've managed to avoid the bad ones so far.
Thanks for sharing! What factors contributed to higher earnings from some apps compared to others?
Mostly, more work put into implementing features requested by users and fixing bugs reported by them, that’s what got me the most money.
Some might say that spending more time on marketing is what gets more money, and that’s a bit true. But only after you have a good base and you’re confident in your app being stable and providing utility. Otherwise, the advertising peaks will not result in sustained revenue, they’ll be just that, peaks.
Wait, why are expenses deducted from profits, as opposed to before profits? Is OP doing something wrong, or is Romanian corporation tax different from normal?
That's a confusion on my part, sorry about that. You are right, the expenses are deducted before profits.
In my case, the expenses are so small (<$1k) that they would not significantly affect the final tax to be paid, so I just left it at the end as an aside.
Great blog for the info. What’s the best way to get into MacOS programming? It seems like all the resources are pretty old, any recommendations?
It's funny how the author complains that he has to pay 15% taxes in Romania. In Germany you have to pay ~50% for taxes and different duties and all expenses are much higher than in Romania. Also German tax authorities are known for "torturing" self-employed people with different types of requests. So when I worked as freelancer in Germany I voluntarily abstained from possible tax reductions via expenses, because German tax authorities will make your life a hell to force you pay as much taxes as possible.
Any taxes paid in CEE are used by crooks to enrich themselves and eventually get back to you in Germany when those people buy luxury goods like MB,BMW cars.
You pay high taxes but you get a semi decent education and health care services. That much money pays for millions of people coming from Romania to your country to work there and provide you with services.
Those people are irreplaceable for Romania.
Just passing by to say I’m a really happy paying Clop user and the design of your UIs and website in general is awesome!
Thank you for stopping by to say this! So glad you like Clop ^_^
Great blogpost and congrats to OP on the success.
As someone who, in a past life, also sold apps on the Mac App Store (with some success), I could never escape the sense of insecurity, whether it be Apple "breaking" (or fixing?) things every WWDC, constant pursuit of the next idea, or potential competition. Not to mention, the fact that sometimes reviews seemed oddly personal and the occasional rude customer support emails could ruin a day. (This all probably says more about my own mental psyche than anything and I'm glad some people thrive in it.)
In the end, I felt more comfortable doing the 9-5 engineering job, but it was definitely worth it and really taught me to be self-sufficient and exploratory in software development.
Yeah, nothing can protect your heart from the inevitable 1-star review that makes you want to punch that human through your screen.
Thankfully, my best selling apps are published on my website, where I don’t have reviews. I have a contact form which can lead to the same disappointing messages, but at least they’re not public and don’t stay there forever.
But yes I understand you, I had many periods when I contemplated going back to a “normal” job.
Romania levvies "corporate income tax" on revenue and not profit? Wow.
It's a special scheme. Normal corporate tax is 16%.
Yeah, but how many hours have you actually worked with all these apps? You make them once, but then I don't imagine you spend 8 hours a day supporting them.
So your hourly wage with the apps is, likely, much more than $120/hr.
Indeed, I can take days and sometimes even weeks off fixing things in Lunar, those hours do add up. I still spend a significant amount of those days answering support emails and Discord chats though, there’s just so much an FAQ can help in highly specialized monitor setups. It also took 2 years of 8-12h work days to reach this state of quasi-stability.
And it was my choice to build more apps and continue spending that earned free time writing code instead of using it all for outside stuff. Mostly because I still need more money to buy my own place.
But you’re right, in the end everything will add up and I’ll hopefully have my own place and I’ll be left with enough free time and some of those apps will still sell well enough to make a living. Compound growth is real here, I’ll be getting a lot more worth than $120/hr.
64% net income.
I totally appreciate the frustration the author has in various fees needing to be paid.
But zooming out, having a business with 64% net income on sales is insanely good.
We should never take for granted the margins in tech. Where almost all other industries have margins around 10%.
having a business with 64% net income on sales is insanely good.
...when you don't factor in labor costs. If this was google or similar, the company would need to hire a developers, which are a major line item on their budget.
Thank you for making this post!
Thank you for reading it, and glad you liked it ^_^
Great comments about the 9-5 wage trap here!
How's the market on Windows platform? Do people buy such apps there?
It feels sad to read the comments about people reaching 30 years of age and these ones realize they are giving their time to someone else when they’re so well paid and when there are so many people in the world that have s*t work and will never get out of it. I hate this world, and how it delivers another year of pain, misery and greed. Just blow up and take us all with it please.
Interesting to compare the commentary about paying taxes vs app store fees. The effective tax rate for income and healthcare for "corrupt politicians to line up their greasy pockets" is very close to the 15% that Apple charges as a fixed percentage. But the latter passes without judgement.
But I could not fit into the same old Slack chat + Zoom meetings + SCRUM + daily report
Time I could have spent with my wife, my brother, my dog, instead of answering support emails from my first waking moment to right before sleeping
That’s painful to read.
I remember Marco Arment saying he didn’t do support at all via email. The argument was that it would take all his waking hours or he would have to hire a whole team just for that. I thought it was arrogant and, honestly, unacceptable back then, but maybe he was right after all.
Congratulations on the apps, they seem incredibly polished. And kudos for the clarity of direction in life. I’d choose to make 3X what I do and deal with the Zoom and soul crunching day to day.
One aspect that shocks me is someone complaining about having a 15.3% tax rate at an income of 84k/year. If your state is incompetent, corrupt and whatever else, its your duty as a citizen to do something about. Barring that, I guess paying less tax than aprox 1.9 million Romanians (aprox tax paid by a minimum wage employee is about 37%) while making about 3 times the average salary is still not good enough.
I appreciate the writeup and the thoughts on time and money, yet the complaints about taxation for someone making this much money in that country, cannot but ruin it a bit for me.
- App Store commission fee (small business 15%): $2.3k > - VAT, Sales Tax, foreign currency exchange fees: $1.1k
I find it horrifying that Apple takes such a big part of the revenue (and at the same time still forces developers to May for a membership program). It's double the taxes the benefit everyone and not just Apple shareholders. That's insane.
The taxes seem low? If you earned that much on a w2 in the US it would be much higher by the time federal, state, and local tax came out. I have no idea what the tax implication would be if the earnings went to an llc. Might even be worse.
But I like to believe that with that difference of $12k I'm buying time.
As long as the semi-passive income from the apps leaves a bit to be saved every month, and there are better things to spend life on, then it seems to be a good choice.
However, modern money system functions well enough that earning a lot a money in a period of time will afford not having to do that later. The question on what to spend time on is definitely harder a priori than a posteri.
I admire him for the last 2 paragraphs, they really shocked me.
But I like to believe that with that difference of $12k I'm buying time.
Sounds like a "lifestyle" business. One which provides income to meet (and exceed) your needs, but you're not stuck head down to the grindstone as life passes by. :)
Thank you for the article Alin! Writing this from Croatia and whatever you said in your article and here in the comments you can interchange Romania an Croatia without a second thought. Myself, I work for a US company and the taxman takes almost half of what I've earned. I wouldn't paying any or all of the tax if I would actually get anything in return. Public health system is on the verge of collapse so you have to pay everything out of pocket to doctors working half of the time in the public hospital, the other half in their own, private clinic (yes you've read that right). Housing prices are astronomical made worse by speculation and foreign investment (for their own houses). Gov says: "Take a 30 year mortgage, there is no housing crysis". Public services are atrocious, schools are terrible, police is terrible. The goverment exists only for transfer of EU funds to Croatian private companies owned by those same politicians or their friends. Everything else is secondary. It's just depressing really as there is no long term goal to actually have a better future for the citizens. Its just a race on how much money the govermnent take from you almost at gunpoint.
Reading you people I start understand Marie Antoinette telling the peasants had no bread to eat cakes. You are the small luckiest percent of humankind living safe comfortable rich life and you still complain. There are billions of people who dream all their life to have half of you have.
Very interesting and inspiring post. I am considering also to start my own indie software business, this is great information.
It’s difficult to find but as a freelancer you can find a middle ground working on interesting projects with radical autonomy earning $100/hour
Great post, happy Lunar user here!
I followed a kind of reverse path in a way: I ran my own small business for some years (first with a partner, then solo) but I eventually got burned out due to the feeling of being always-on. I’m now in contractor mode but working mostly like an employee for every project I participate in, and this did work better for me financially and personally too.
That said, I always think of maybe trying my business again (though I wouldn’t have employees next time around) and now that my daughter is about to start University doing animation and video games, who knows, maybe she needs a programmer one day and I can be that guy. That’d also help her work for herself and not be an employee. Thank you for an inspiring post!
Also, I somehow didn’t know about rcmd. I feel frustrated by cmd tab since ido-switch-buffer in emacs has spoiled me; it seems rcmd is close to that for task switching so I’ll give that a try right after my current vacation, so I’ll be a user of another software by you :)
Edit: s/helped/herself/
A rather inefficient system that results in such a large cut of the revenue
There is a buzz word = turn-key ap. That is an app that installs and runs and they you have a pack of youtube/? videos for all install problems that you can use to prune support calls, along with remote access ap that you send to client on the basis that you as dev or your employee are so good at this stuff that once on his desktop you can solve all problems a lot faster than chatting on the phone. The first aspect - turn key = sell and never see them again apart from the annual fee = it must have seen-all/solved-all installation bugaboos, and eveyt ime you get a new one = fixed. Unless you reach turn-key, you are a boat with a leak, double sales = 2 boats = 2 leaks and you need more people on the pumps. You need a boat with no leaks at all - as if that was ever possible, so you get as close to that as possible so you waste less time on support = more in the bank.
doing something that you feel it has no purpose in the real world
Bingo! In fact, i've been doing custom dev for my entire career and i developed an instinct that instantly tells me a good client from a bad one. If something clearly has no purpose in the real world, is an absurd bullshit, then i know it's a good project and worth taking. That's just how business works, a natural law of competition: if something makes any sense and provides any value to people, there will be a lot of talented, energetic people doing it so competition will be insane => no money to be made.
After all, it's all just a game, in the end of which money either falls on your account or it doesn't. It's not supposed to make any sense in the first place, otherwise it's no longer a job, it's a hobby.
“In your world, people are used to fighting for resources... like oil, or minerals, or land. But when you have access to the vastness of space, you realize there's only one resource worth fighting over... even killing for: More time. Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe.”
— Kalique Abrasa, Jupiter Ascending
These apps are neat I think I’ll buy at least one of them.
Is there a good site or source or something to find more apps like this? I am a fan of these very simple purpose built Mac apps that are keyboard heavy and solve simple problems.
Glad to see he makes the majority of his money outside the App Store.
I found Apple to outright manipulative. Pay 100$ a year and we reserve the right to delist or reject your apps for no reason.
That's why I'm not that upset that no one wants to work with an old guy (that's me), and I was forced to retire.
I still get to play with software, but on my own time, and on my own schedule.
The difference is amazing.
How is that not actionable discrimination?
because they say “not a good culture fit” and you can’t prove anything
Yup. Also, the entire industry pretty much actively supports and accommodates ageism. It's not like a few "rogue actors." Everyone is in on it, and it starts from the top.
Also, I found out that some younger folks really hate us. A number of folks used the interview process to try humiliating me, and taking out their personal animus.
After a few of these, I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and just accepted that I shouldn't bother looking, anymore.
But I think people are being hoist by their own petard. I'm seeing folks in their forties, that never had any issue, finding work, hitting the wall. These were people that did it to others, when they were working.
We can't become other races, and we [usually] can't become other genders, but we all become old, so each of us will have a turn at the wheel.
Have you tried the indie software thing like this guy? How has that been going? I feel like I have enough saved now that even if I can't get corporate work anymore due to age (which I kind of doubt due to the age of people I've worked with in FANG, and the fact I'm already pretty much a manager of managers, which tends to run older) that I would be pretty happy doing the indie thing too.
I'm working on apps for nonprofits that can't afford people of my caliber. I don't charge for my work, but take it every bit as seriously, as if I were. It's actually part of the satisfaction that I get from the work.
Keeps me busy and up-to-date, and is extremely gratifying.
I'm getting ready to release an app that is a top-to-bottom system, involving a couple of servers that I wrote, along with a fairly robust native iOS frontend.
Works a charm. I've enjoyed it. Of course, I have to keep my scope humble, but I've always been able to punch above my weight, so it's working out.
Do you invoice them anyway and zero out your fee, or just do the work for free and don't invoice them?
I don't invoice them. The outfit is really small. I am an officer of the 501(c)(3), though.
I've found that most non-tech folks don't have any idea how much it costs to have real talent working for them (or even crap talent). I don't feel like arguing about it. I can't declare it, so it's not worth the agita.
I had an org in NYC offer me a Director of Product role ... for $90K.
FWIW: For your non-profit work, I'd recommend charging full price as donation if your tax jurisdiction allows this.
Sadly, it does not. We're not allowed to declare "sweat equity."
If I was able to declare it, I'd never pay a dime in taxes.
I have heard that Steve Kamen, who wrote the "I Love New York" jingle, gave full rights to the state, and never has to pay state taxes. I haven't found anything that corroborates this, but it could very well be true.
The work I do, is for a demographic that tends to be ignored. I doubt there's any tax breaks, headed my way.
We just hired a guy out of retirement a few years ago. Retired after 30 years of C dev but wanted to keep busy in the small town we're based in. He's beloved by all of the software devs and the cyber team (we're basically two companies in one). The first week he was asking questions about how git worked. Then like a week later he was explaining why massive amounts of python code we wrote for running simulations was inefficient and how it could be fixed.
Same thing here we hired a retired domain specialist, sure he had issues with all current dev environments, tooling etc. But that's still a really clear net positive. There is no way we could have built this without the decades of knowledge he has.
I have this cynical recurring fantasy that when the Unix epoch rolls over and every legacy system is broken, they’re not going to have anyone left in the workforce who knows the difference between the stack and the heap, and who can debug through disassembly when the binary has no symbols; so they’ll hire us graybeards out of retirement to save the day. Then I wake up and admit that what’s more likely to happen is the 25 yr old Directors of Engineering would rather rewrite all the software in JavaScript rather than admit they need us.
Or: "Thank you for your time, we decided to continue with another candidate."
And half of the companies simply ghosting unwanted candidates with no response after the interview.
You do not often get an email to tell you you were not accepted for a position (unless you made it far in the process)
Businesses have pushed heavily for at-will employment; this means that businesses don't need to say why people are fired.
So they don't have to write down why you were not hired, nor why you were fired.
So you have to prove that you were not hired/or fired for being in a protected class. This is extremely difficult short of a recording of the interviewer saying e.g. "so you're pregnant?" => can possibly argue discrimination, but it's still difficult. This kind of stuff works in a panel interviews or bad work environment when you can compel testimony from other workers who would rather risk their job over jail... but doesn't work well in 1:1 or 2:1 situations where one or two people just need to lie to avoid the lawsuit.
Or, not even lie, but just be unaware of the subconscious biases influencing them. Then they can say with a completely straight face that your group had nothing to do with it, even if that isn't true.
I’ve given a hundred people advice on handling discrimination at this point, and the thing I always stress is that it only matters what you can prove, not what happened.
Protecting yourself against discrimination doesn’t mean trusting the courts. It means being willing to lie or mislead people into thinking you aren’t in the category of people who gets discriminated against, making yourself too much trouble to fire, and finding open-minded employers.
If you’re in a disadvantaged group, you need to pick your battles, and accept that life isn’t fair.
Pure Wisdom!
Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
You call it discrimination, they call it employment at will.
I assume it's not that easy to prove, so most people don't take legal action.
Personally, I don't take legal action even if I think I can win the case, because it's just too much time and effort, and I don't want my life to focus on said legal procedure for the next n months.
I assume other people also think they need to choose their battles.
If they're in the US, only provable discrimination is actionable, and you'd have to hire a lawyer.
It's not worth trying to force people to work and share income with anyone they deem ugly. It will add cognitive load / dissonance and hurt their performance. Lookism is not okay, this is not about endorsing these kinds of behaviors, but nor it is something that can be instantly nullified by just coming up with the labeling.
Maybe isolating cubicle walls, snail mails, audio-only telephones, and non-engineer sales representatives were good things. And possibly VR avatars in the future too.
But anyway, the point is, threatening someone who hates you(for any reasons, not limited to their bigotry) to work with you is not the path of least resistance.
I imagine it’s a lot harder to sue an industry for not hiring you than it is to sue your employer for firing you.
Amazing given you can maintain your standard of living.
I had enough saved, to allow myself to do OK. I wasn't planning on retiring for another ten years, but I wasn't really given a choice.
How old are you?
I am now 61. I was 55, when I left my last company.
Hold on. You couldn't find a job at 55 because you were perceived as too old?
Oh, yeah. I hear people in their thirties, complaining about being treated as "old."
When the CEO is 26, then it's easy to have a young workforce. In The Days of Yore, the C-suite was generally folks in their fifties, and the youngsters were forced to work with their chronological seniors. The older folks had the money and power, but they needed the creativity and energy of the younger workers.
If the workforce is all older folks, you get shipping product that no one wants. If the workforce is all younger folks, you get ... FTX.
Look at some of these "full team" photos, for many of these new companies. You won't see a grey hair anywhere, and, if you do, a bit of research usually shows them to be a Principal.
I fully admit that it's a world that doesn't want or need people like me. It really pissed me off, at first, but, in the aggregate, it has resulted in the first truly happy work that I've done in decades, so it's all good.
That said, some of my former employees are near my age, and were able to find work, but it took each of them, several years, and they didn't have the baggage of being a former manager.
What places are you working where executives are 26 and 55 is too old? My experience is very very different.
Hearing experiences like these make me glad I never got a job at a startup or smaller “tech” company.
That's the thing: I'm not working there, because they'd never hire me.
In my (limited) experience (about five years ago), the recruiters were always engaging, helpful and friendly. However, as soon as one technical person (usually young) got involved, the temperature dropped about thirty degrees.
I may not be God's gift to programming, but I'm not that bad. I do, for example, have over thirty years' experience shipping extremely high-Quality products, in very challenging environments. In many fields, that usually commands a tiny bit of respect.
I had a bit of a mental shift after I turned 30, realising I'd spent the best part of a decade building up my career in various ways.
I'm still in the typical 9-5 job since I'm way too young to retire (and we don't get paid the crazy money in the UK that software engineers in parts of the US do), but I've been able to settle on what I want and what I don't want so I have the power to walk away.
In the simplest terms, I just need to be at a place working on something I give a fuck about, which pushes me to smaller upstarts. This sometimes incurs a bit of a paycut but I see that as a worthwhile hit to take if I don't feel like I'm selling my soul to people I realise I don't want to work for.
Just gotta avoid the lifestyle creep so a temporary downsize doesn't contribute to mental distress.
Building up career is a trap.
The system is designed to capture everyone as a wage slave and every year there are more barriers put to keep the "pleb" in their lane.
The only way to build wealth (independence, freedom) for one's family is through starting a business that you can scale.
If you go to work at a company always think how you can use the knowledge gained there to start something of your own. Use salaried work as a paid for education, not a mean for living, otherwise you'll get trapped forever.
30 is a turning point, where most people realise about the situation they are in and look for escape.
That would always be one's own business.
If you are not in a position to run one, always ask for true equity in the business you want to work in.
Definitely not true. If you keep your expenses down and your compensation up (FAANG, etc.) you can easily make enough to retire early.
“Just be one of the vanishingly few to 1.work at FAANG + 2.as a L6-or-greater SWE + 3.in the Bay Area” is not a realistic strategy.
Yes, if all those miracles come true that lottery winner can retire early, but I don’t think that is a broadly applicable plan.
It's not even just FAANG anymore. Plenty of places pay over 350k for a senior.
And Seattle is probably a much better place with respect to taxes and cost of living. Most other cities where FAANG will employ are fine. Don't have to be #1 to win.
Still a lottery winner with respect to the global employment market. But if you graduated with a US software engineering degree, you can make this happen.
And for those who were born outside the US, none of this is applicable (unless you are young and can try emigration), and the advice to be an entrepreneur is correct.
EDIT: There are some people here who claim you can earn that kind of money outside the US, but they never give details when pressed, or describe some kind of very specific set of life circumstances you will never be able to replicate.
I will bite. L4 Google in Zürich, Switzerland. Base: 163k CHF (very low, just promoted), 15% bonus, 50k USD GOOG / year. Not counting stocks, I net 9k a month while maxing retirement account (aka Roth IRA but with less returns) at 2.7k CHF / month. Rent: 2.3k / month in city center, Health insurance: 350 CHF / month. No other significant expenses.
I invest 3.8k CHF / month from base only. All in all, I save ~100k CHF a year counting bonus and stocks.
You also need to be okay working at a FAANG.
After working in a 4k person org, I don’t think I could stomach working at another giant company.
Pro tip: avoid highly specialised knowledge that can only be used in particular firms e.g. highly capitalised or regulated entities. Yes you will be paid well above market rates but it will be very difficult to convert those skills into a business because you won't have access to the market as a solo entrepreneur.
Time and again I'll see that the people who start successful lifestyle businesses started off in a lower paying, more general career e.g. web development. It works because you'll encounter problems that apply to a huge market, and you'll have past customers you can tap into to sell your product that addresses those problems e.g. WordPress plugins or invoicing software particular to your region of the world. Boring but high demand software.
Wouldn't having deep specialisation in a particular field help you to gain a competitive advantage when deciding to go it alone and starting a company in that area?
Absolutely, but the more specialised, the more likely your skill is one part of a much bigger structure and therefore you're less likely to be able to leverage it as a solo entrepreneur.
For example, you spend 15 years becoming a lead engineer for a vehicle manufacturer. But there's very few ways you can then that into a solo business, other than consulting (which is no longer the same work).
Many countries - like UK - have restricted consulting type of business, where it's not possible to make profit, as consulting engagement has to be taxed as deemed employment, even if it is a legitimate business, when service is provided by the owner of the company. Pulling the ladders etc.
You have seen the light. Thing is it’s doable. Keep pushing.