I Made $6725 in February 2021
Tags: freelancing, contracting, webdev
Published: 2021-03-09 20:13:46

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*[(article version on Kodeblok)](https://kodeblok.com/posts/i-made-6725-in-february-2021/)*

As always, I'm late with this month's income report.

February was another record-breaking month.

I've managed to land another client and start taking my side project, [Get Django Saas](https://getdjangosaas.com/), more seriously on the marketing side.

**TL;DR I made $6725 for 128 hours of work on two projects. I have no other projects in the pipeline.**

## Projects

### Client #1 ($4800 for 96 hours of work)

Except for hiring more engineers, there isn't anything new with Client #1.

I'm still working with them three days a week for a weekly retainer of $1200.

### Client #2 ($1925 for 32 hours of work)

As you might have guessed so far, I've landed another client this month.

I wasn't looking for another client but @sahil shared this [Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686678) and this one person caught my attention so I decided to reach out.

This client is working in niche and tech stack I'm very familiar with so it wasn't a tough sell.

To make an already short story shorter, I've signed a **three-months contract at a $60 hourly rate**.

Woo hoo!

### Get Django Saas ($0 for ? hours of work)

As I've mentioned in [January report](https://kodeblok.com/posts/i-made-4800-in-january-2021/), I've started building a Django/Vue Saas boilerplate.

I didn't track time on this project but I've got a couple of major things done:
- Switched up colors on the landing page not to look like every other template
- Started implementing a blog by watching [this Gatsby from Scratch YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaZti24zg4&list=PLmZPx_9ZF_sD01cudvw8KptggcOX-vM7U)
- Wired up authentication (which I'll probably need to rewrite at some point)
- Integrated [Sendgrid](https://sendgrid.com/) for sending confirmation emails. Originally wanted to do this either via [MailChimp](https://mailchimp.com/) or [EmailOctopus](https://emailoctopus.com/) but these products are used more for email marketing rather than transactional emails
- Created the most of common components 

Some things I want to do before launching are:
- Finish up common components library
- Authorization
- Teams
- Payment provider integration. [Stripe](https://stripe.com/) is not supported in my country so I have no idea how I'll pull that off
- Documentation

I plan to launch on [Gumroad](https://gumroad.com/) and then start building out sample *micro-saas* products to demo the boilerplate.

Here's how my Trello is looking like right now.

![Get Django Saas Trello February 2021](https://kodeblok.com/images/february-2021-trello.png)

Red tags are critical.

Blue ones are 0.1 release which is when I'll try to get some beta users and do a soft launch.

Indigo ones are either nice-to-haves or something I'll implement after I get a sale or two to validate that this is  a product worth working on.

## Leads

I've currently got no leads in the pipeline.

I don't know if you'd consider Client#2 a lead since it took us a week from the initial meeting to start working together.

## Expenses

| Expenses           | Amount  |
|--------------------|---------|
| Transaction Fees   | $480 |
| Taxes              | $798    |
| Retirement Fund    | $154.5    |
| Ethereum           | $320    |
| HelloBonsai        | $19     |
| Google Workspace   | $12     |
| Namecheap          | $8      |
| Github Sponsorship | $5      |
| Patreon            | $13     |
| **Total**          | **$1810**  |

Of course, with more revenues comes more expenses.

Currently, the biggest expense after taxes is transaction fees. I've had better rates when I used [PayPal](https://www.paypal.com/) instead of wiring money directly into my bank account but PayPal would often refuse to transfer money.

Taxes are a bit higher than the amount I made since I've received around $1600 that was locked out in my PayPal account since November.

International transfer fees are bullshit.

Last month I forgot to include a $10 monthly subscription to Google Workspace. I use it just to have a custom email address. I know you can set up custom email via a domain provider like Namecheap but with those emails I can't send or receive any files which is a problem.

If you want details about any other expense on the list you can reference the [January report](https://kodeblok.com/posts/i-made-4800-in-january-2021/).

## Conclusion

February of 2021 was a record-breaking month.

I forecast that March will be too since I started working for Client #2 in the middle of the month.

And I charged him for only 24 out of 32 logged hours because I was looking at the timesheet for the past two weeks instead of the whole month. Oops. 

In total, I've made **$6725** in gross revenue. If we take out **$1810** of expenses, I'm left out with **$4915** of profit.

If you like these updates and don't want to miss them out, you can [subscribe to my newsletter](https://adems-freelance-journey.carrd.co/).

If you want to read previous updates, [visit the Archive](https://kodeblok.com/categories/monthly-update/).

See you again in a month,

Adem Hodzic