Best Freelance Niches For Developers
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It’s no exaggeration to say that today’s freelance market is a bit oversaturated. There tens of thousands of developers on platforms like Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr and it seems that the only way you can survive is by specializing really, really hard.
Today we will go over best freelance niches for developers. Note that some of these are not as popular as others so there are smaller volumes of these kinds of jobs.
Git
Git is the most popular version control systems on the market today. It’s used everywhere from one-man open-source libraries to tech giants like Google.
But it can be confusing from time to time. Every developer had Git issues at some point in their lives.
Because it’s a bit difficult topic there are companies out there that are willing to pay contractors more than $100 per hour to resolve their specific git issues, create pipelines for their code or hold training for their employees.
Stripe
Transferring money over the internet is a very daunting experience for developers. There are a million things that could go wrong.
That’s why we have Stripe to help us out by abstracting all of the pain points away from us for a small fee.
Stripe is a platform for allowing business and customers to transfer money via the internet in a very secure and safe way. Besides transferring money, Stripe platform also provides other services like invoicing, subscription-based payments and even service for registering your business.
Best thing about this niche is that Stripe is really popular niche and there are a lot of clients and not a lot freelancers.
Unbounce
Unbounce is an online platform for creating landing pages. It’s pretty popular among marketers but it is also a good niche to specialize in since there are not a lot of developers familiar with it.
So you can probably get hired as an Unbounce developer if you understand your JavaScript and CSS very well since most of the work is creating custom scripts for already existing pages. Some other tasks would include creating pages from the ground up or integrating Unbounce with third-party APIs like Mailchimp or Slack.
Drupal
Drupal is a super powerful PHP CMS. It’s not a tool for a regular Joe to create his blog but it is the weapon of choice for companies whose websites have tons of content.
It is used by huge brands like Riot Games, SpaceX, Pinterest, Twitter, Verizon, Nokia and Nasa.
Drupal might have one of the smallest communities among Content Management Systems but that community is full of high-end customers (mostly companies) who need Drupal experts. If you log into Upwork and search for Drupal jobs, you can see that there are up to 15 people max applying per job, unlike WordPress where you regularly see 50+ people.
You can leverage this shortage of developers to make some serious money.
Atlassian Suite
Doing any kind of job requires you to use the best tools available and there are no better tools for software development than those from Atlassian.
Atlassian is a company that creates tools for efficient software development workflows based on Agile methodologies.
It provides a range of software that improves workflows like Jira for issue tracking and Confluence for document sharing. Although most of them are paid there are free solutions also like Trello for collaboration and Bitbucket for Git repository management.
But if you have ever had to set them up properly you would know that it’s a huge pain in the ass if you are not paying Atlassian to set it up for you.
That’s why companies outsource setup, maintenance and integration of these tools to experts outside of them.
Static Site Generators
I have talked a bit about Static Site Generators in one of my previous blogs. Although they are very easy to use even for not-technical folks, there is still a need for developers when someone needs a custom theme or plugin or needs help with deployment.
My favourite one is Hugo but Gatsby and Jekyll are also popular choices for this niche.
Godot
Godot is an open-source game engine. It has support for both 2D and 3D games as well as its own programming language called GDScript which is pretty similar to Python.
Truth to be told, Unity still holds the majority of today’s market but Godot is becoming a really popular choice among many game developers and companies. In my opinion, the fact that Godot is truly 100% free forever is deal-breaker because that’s not what engines like Unity and Unreal provide.
That’s why you should choose Godot as your niche. It might not be as popular right now but it certainly will become more popular in the upcoming years.
AWS
AWS is an acronym for Amazon Web Services. It is a platform for on-demand cloud computing resources. It’s by regular people, companies big and small and even governments.
It has a pretty steep learning curve but is a very profitable niche.
If you don’t like Amazon or AWS you can opt into some other platform that provides similar service like Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Just bear in mind that GCP and Azure are far less popular than AWS so there will be a bit more trouble at finding customers.
If you want to learn more about AWS and Cloud Computing head on to Udacity and use this link to get a discount on their Cloud Developer Nanodegree Program.
Kafka
Apache Kafka is a piece of technology created by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache foundation. It’s written in Java and Scala.
Kafka is distributed streaming platform. It’s most popular use case is to do the job of message broker meaning instead of apps speaking directly one to another they speak to Kafka and it has the responsibility to distribute between two or more parties.
Of course, I am describing Kafka at a very, very high level. There is a lot to learn and a lot of developers find this either too boring or too intimidating.
Most of the clients looking for Kafka developers are huge companies with deep pockets so you can definitely profit if you put in the time to learn Kafka.
Conclusion
These were niches that could use a bit more freelancers. As you might have noticed a lot of these niches involve big companies and expensive software.
These might not be the flashiest or even interesting niches but they certainly are paying very well.