You get an offer for $35/hour. Is that good? Bad? Robbery? Every calculator on the internet asks what rate you want — none tell you what the rate you were offered actually means.
The pain is documented.
Search r/freelance for "is X/hr good" and you'll find the same question asked roughly twice a week, every week, for the last six years. The answers are anecdotal. The data exists — it just isn't packaged for the moment a contractor needs it: thirty seconds before responding to a client email.
Existing calculators (Clockify, Bonsai, half a dozen Notion templates) all run forward: input your salary expectation, output a rate. Useful when you're setting your rate. Useless when someone has already proposed one.
The evidence of demand.
Three numbers that matter:
The distribution of senior React contractor rates in North America (n=312) shows a median of $92/hr, with the long left tail where most lowball offers land.
The proposed product.
A single-page tool. You paste a rate, your stack, your region, your seniority. It returns where that number sits in the live distribution: percentile, comparable roles, and one honest sentence — "this is a 31st-percentile offer for your stack; here's a counter that lands at the 60th."
Competitive landscape:
The build flow.
Four steps, all static:
- Scrape boards — Upwork, Toptal, public LinkedIn, Indie Hackers. Weekly.
- Normalize — stack tags, regions, seniority levels. Drop noise.
- Bin + percentile — by stack × region × seniority cell.
- Serve as JSON — static, CDN-cached. No backend.
Reasons this might not work.
R-01 — The data goes stale fast. Contract rates move quarterly. Without a refresh pipeline, the tool is wrong by month four. Mitigation: ship with a "data as of" badge and a quarterly re-scrape.
R-02 — Anchoring cuts both ways. Honest percentile data may help clients lowball as easily as it helps freelancers counter. Frame the output for the contractor, not the buyer.
R-03 — Nobody pays for a calculator. Free tier forever; revenue from the $9 niche reports ("Senior React rates, EU, Q3 2026").
The receipts.
- r/freelance — "Is $35/hr good for senior React?" · 2024-11-03
- r/forhire — biweekly rate-check threads · 2024–2026
- ahrefs keyword data, queries containing "is $" and "/hr" · 2026-04
- Clockify rate calculator (forward-only) · accessed 2026-04-22
- Bonsai freelance rate tool (forward-only) · accessed 2026-04-22
- Levels.fyi contractor rates dataset · 2026-Q1
- Hacker News "Ask HN: contractor rates" threads · 2023–2026
- Indie Hackers — rate-transparency thread · 2025-08
- G2 reviews of freelance accounting tools · scraped 2026-03
- Twitter/X — @levelsio rate poll · 2026-01