nylemi

I've been freelancing now for two years and have been in projects 37.5 hours/week without pause except for vacations. There is a lot of demand here. The hourly rate depends. I've been getting 90€/hour except with one client I managed 110 €/hour. I've always made direct contracts with customers, no contracting company in between. But there's a lot of those companies around who would happily help you find projects and sell your time through them so they also get a cut.

In Finland the highest you can hope for as an employed software developer is around 90,000 EUR a year, but average is less than 60k. Signing bonuses I've never heard of and if you get stock options, you usually need to cut your salary expectations a lot. Being freelancer you can get to around 150k-200k though. Of course at these higher figures the effective tax rate increases to around 50%