We're currently trying to find our first gigs on upwork, I'm super strong in Polymer (webcomponents) and frontend in general. It's a very rare skill because not that many people are doing webcomponents yet and I've been doing it for 4+ years.
I'm wondering if you can raise your prices higher than usual if you do something that's very much in demand, does it work, or does it just scare of potential customers? How do you approach it in the beginning? Should you go with normal rates, or does a specific skillset that's hard to find justify to raise the prices?
WDYT? e. g. meteor developers in the Philippines are paid quite well because it's super hard to find them.
title: "Raise freelance price for hard to find skillset such as Polymer and webcomponents?"
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Top comments (8)
While I lean towards yes, I also wanted to point out that Custom Elements still has very sparing browser support caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1
Absolutely, but if someone is looking for a Polymer dev, why not :).
Btw, Firefox is releasing shadow DOM and custom elements in October, so only Edge is left out soon (which you can polyfill technically, although with bad performance hits)
BTW the light green bar does not mean it's buggy btw, it's just an improved version of custom elements.
the light green represents missing features from the spec and FF has them behind a flag
That's what polyfills are for, and they're slowly being replaced as specs are adopted by browser vendors. FF just activated ShadowDOM support in their nightly build. Webcomponents moved to NPM module imports, which cleared a big hurdle, and a modified HTML imports spec is still under discussion. So, the color chart doesn't really tell the whole story.
In answer to the fee increase, I already have, and, if anything, I'm turning away work on Polymer PWAs and headless projects.
To some degree, you need to find a fit. If people aren't looking for polymer, you cant force them to use it or seek it.
I would instead look at what is currently out there on freelance sites to get a better idea of what type of requests are paying the price you want.
I too am a UI dev and I almost never hear polymer brought up anymore. It's angular/vue/react/ember. Which changes this situation to look at how things are opposed to how they should be or how you want them to be.
Raising freelance rates for niche skill sets like SRD Sassa payment, Polymer, and Web Components is a smart strategy to reflect specialized expertise. These technologies require advanced knowledge and are in high demand due to their complexity and the limited pool of skilled professionals. Mastering such hard-to-find skills allows developers to command higher rates, offering significant value to projects needing secure payment solutions and advanced front-end development.
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