Freelancing as a Autitic Developer

For the past few years I have been freelancing instead of working on my art and my games. I needed to do this because I needed the money.

I started by charging by the hour. That had its issues, but it is the most standard way of freelancing.

I was only charging $32/h, which was way too little, far below my worth. That is the hard part as an autistic person, we are too honest.

I was only getting really shitty clients, the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel clients that dump you as soon as they can.

I got ghosted so many times I stopped counting. That is when I started looking for other business models. That is where I discovered Productized Services.

I explored various productized services like my “Unlimited Dev Service”. That actually worked really well.

Running my Productized Developer Service was really successful. I made more money from Dec 2023 to Sep 2025.

Then Vibe Coding happened. I lost all my clients to Claude Code and similar tools. I had to shut down my business.

That is when I decided to pivot. My neighbors are small business owners and they wanted to know about OpenClaw.

I told them it is the WordPress of AI agents. It is not the best, but it is the 20% that gets you 80% of the results.

That got me 2 leads that day. I am now setting up OpenClaw for small businesses. This is my new productized service.

Why Productized Services are Great for Autistic Entrepreneurs

Productized services are really easy to sell, and you can systematize everything.

When I was billing hourly I was always second guessing what I could bill or not bill for because I did not want to seem like I was just running up a fee.

Productized services are very narrow in scope, so you know what you can charge for.

A fixed price for a fixed scope then allows you to templatize, systematize, and optimize your work. This means that your effective hourly rate is massive.

These are some of the things you can templatize. They include but are not limited to:

• Websites
• Contracts
• Workflows
• Onboarding flows
• Email outreach

If you can templatize it, you can automate it. I am now creating fully automated, productized services for my clients.

I am using OpenClaw for this end. For example, I am creating a productized analytics insights service that helps optimize your marketing and your sales.

Why Autistic People Should Start Productized Services

I feel that us autistic people are very good at creating systems. Services that are systemized are easier to run, sell, and scale.

Autistic people are often unemployed or underemployed. This is often due to having a hard time working in environments we do not control.

With Productized Services you can have full control of your schedule and weaponize your autism to make a scalable and very profitable business.

This will allow us to make a living off of our special interests more easily, or do work that pays the bills so we can focus on our special interests if it is not practical to monetize them.