I've done it all, from freelancing to startups to starting a cafe.<p>What consistently worked for me is teaching, in hours worked, risk/repeatability, and overall time (3 months).<p>The cafe brought me that kind of sales in about 10 weeks, but after factoring all the other costs, the income was lower than an average salary.<p>Startups are very slow to set up. Something with 5%-10% margin would be faster to set up - get a product, hack together an online shop, drop some money on Google ads. But when you look at profitability it could take way more than a year for that kind of money. Cafes are faster.<p>A startup with 90% profit margin would bring in the income much faster, but it may take a very long time to build such a thing, easily 3+ months.<p>Freelancing is good. A fixed price project would pay that well in about 1 month if you're good and reputable. I've been offered about 4 projects crossing the $10k mark, but all of them failed for some reason (mostly miscommunication).<p>A beginner freelancer might make about $25-$50 an hour.<p>But with similar experience, you might get about $50-$75 an hour teaching bootcamps or individuals.<p>The reasoning being that most people who hire freelancers instead of in house programmers are broke startups or don't have tech as their core. The price for freelance coding is also pegged against people all over the world. So some lady in India or Indonesia would be equally happy making 5x less. With teaching, your competitors are geographically limited.<p>Also, programming is very tiring work and teaching not so much. So you can put in many more hours and it's more suitable for someone working full time.