Are you making $80,000 gross or net?<p>Either way, honestly, I would say you don't have a niche problem, you have a (potentially) marketing, sales, and rate problem.<p>As you point out there is plenty of work as a Full-stack LAMP engineer. It might not be exciting or the new kid on the block but there is plenty of it to go around. The problem is that you either:<p>A) Aren't doing enough business - If you are making $80,000 gross you are only working 800 hours a year. That could be good or bad, but right now I bet it doesn't feel like enough.<p>B) Aren't charging enough - $100 an hour is pretty inexpensive for a consultant of any sort.<p>C) All of the above!! This is the right answer by the way.<p>I will link to one of my favorite comments on this topic for you to read, it was by tptacek, and I keep it bookmarked [1]. But the long and short is, raise your rates, specialize in things your existing customer base needs, find new customers that also need those things, raise your rates, focus on business objectives for your customers, stop billing hourly, raise your rates, generalize, raise your rates. You probably should just keep on raising your rates.<p>So what does this mean for a full-stack LAMP engineer? Are you really good with Wordpress or Magento? Raise your rates and start selling wordpress and magento services. Are you exceptional at tuning MySQL? Raise your rates and start selling high scalability MySQL tuning. Are you an expert in making apps more stable and easier to deploy? ... You get the idea. Don't go away from what you are good at. Dive deeper into it.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615</a>