From Hourly Freelancing to AI Automation

For the past few years I stopped working on my art and games.

Instead, I freelanced.

Not because I wanted to.

Because I needed the money.

Like most freelancers, I started by charging hourly.

$32/hour.

Which was way too low.

One thing I’ve noticed about many autistic developers is we tend to be too honest and terrible at pricing ourselves.

Because of that, I attracted the worst possible clients.

Bottom-of-the-barrel clients.

The kind that ghost you the second they think they can get something cheaper.

I got ghosted so many times I stopped counting.

So I started looking for a better model.

That’s when I discovered productized services.

Instead of billing hourly, you sell a fixed service for a fixed price.

Example:

• Website setup • Dev support • Automation workflows • Analytics systems

I experimented with an Unlimited Dev Service model.

And surprisingly…

It worked.

From Dec 2023 → Sep 2025 I made more money than I ever had freelancing.

For the first time freelancing actually felt stable.

Then something happened.

AI coding tools.

Clients started experimenting with things like Claude Code and similar tools.

Almost overnight, many of my clients disappeared.

So I pivoted.

Some of my neighbors are small business owners and they started asking about AI automation.

I introduced them to OpenClaw.

I describe it like this:

“OpenClaw is basically the WordPress of AI agents.”

It’s not the most powerful solution.

But it’s the 20% of functionality that gives you 80% of the results.

That explanation clicked immediately.

That same day I got two leads.

Now I’m setting up AI automation systems for small businesses.

And once again…

I’m building it as a productized service.

Here’s something I’ve learned:

Productized services work incredibly well for autistic entrepreneurs.

Why?

Because they are system driven.

You can templatize everything:

• onboarding • workflows • outreach • contracts • service delivery

And if you can templatize it…

You can automate it.

Many autistic people struggle in traditional workplaces.

But we often excel at building systems.

Productized services turn that into a business advantage.

Instead of trying to fit into broken systems…

You build your own system.

And scale it.

Curious:

Have you experimented with productized services or AI automation yet?