There are many fundamentally different ways of making money with Python. Freelancing is just one of them (although it’s an extremely attractive one that allows you to earn between $50 and $60 per hour as an average coder).
Here are the different ways of how Python developers make money:
- Work as a full-time Python developer for a company. This is the obvious way and there are hundreds of thousands such jobs all over the world. You go to work in an office. You meet your buddies at the coffee corner. And you are working on Python projects day in and day out. As an employed Python developer in the US, you can expect to earn $104,408 per year.
- Create your own scalable Python business online. You can write a blog, sell information products, host Google ads, and do affiliate marketing. There’s no ceiling to your income here (with millions of Python coders online). I’d estimate that the top Python bloggers earn six figures PER MONTH. Please note, that this estimate is only based on my experience and the subscriber and visitor counts of those bloggers. For example, this awesome Python blog reports having millions of visitors each month. If only 1% buy an info product for $20, the income would be $200,000 per month.
- Work as a freelancer. I know you asked for jobs that are NOT freelancing. But why? It’s a great way of getting paid for learning, working from the comfort of your own home, and earn an even higher hourly rate of $50 per hour. Assuming you work 2,400 hours per year (a reasonable assumption), you’d earn $120,000 per year gross. This webinar shows you the state of the art in the Python freelancing space.
- Work in a completely unrelated field. I have hundreds of thousands of users on my Python training application Finxter.com. Many of them don’t work full-time as Python coders. They are doctors, lawyers, government officials, teachers, students, professors, scientists, Papas (and some Mamas), and even some craftsmen. All of them can benefit from writing Python code because it will help them finish their jobs faster and “automate the boring tasks”. Ultimately, these efficiency gains will increase their income so that you could argue that part of the money they earned came through Python. In other words, they earn money with Python!
- Create mini software for passive income. It doesn’t matter whether you write a crypto-trading bot in Python, a file converter that sells for $10 online, or a Python bot that crawls data set which you sell online for $100. All those are great ways of putting your small Python learning projects to use and create real value for the marketplace. Each time you create value, you have a good chance of monetizing a part of the value created.
- Work as a Python consultant. Companies all over the world rely on their Python code to run smoothly and properly. For example, Reddit, Google, or Facebook are all known to use Python in production (source)! Well, working as a consultant my also be viewed as a freelancing job—but it’s slightly different because you also have elements of scalability with your consultancy service online.
That’s all I can think of for now. Yet, I’m sure there are countless additional applications in finance, health, or mobility. Just be creative!