Hi everyone!

I'm a Drupal developer from Argentina and I'm considering starting to offer my services as a freelance developer, mainly working with clients from the US or other English-speaking markets.

I have 5+ years of hands-on Drupal experience, working with custom modules, content types, hooks/events, custom blocks, Layout Builder, Twig/CSS, SDC/Storybook, integrations, caching and performance optimization. I also have a broader Full-Stack background with React, Next.js, Node.js/NestJS, PHP/Laravel, Docker, AWS and CI/CD.

I've been working remotely with US-based teams, but most of my current work is through a company rather than directly with clients. So I'm trying to understand what the current freelance market looks like for Drupal developers.

A few questions for those of you already freelancing:

• What hourly rate would be reasonable for someone with my experience?
• What rates are you currently charging or seeing in the market?
• Is it realistic to get freelance work with basic spoken English but good written English, especially for remote work?
• How important is spoken English in your experience? Are most interactions with clients meetings, or is a lot of the communication done asynchronously through Slack/email/tickets?

I'm not necessarily looking to charge US senior rates from day one. I'd rather start with a reasonable rate, build some direct client experience and gradually increase it.

I'd really appreciate any advice or experiences you can share. Thanks!

We have a SOC 2 readiness kit with policy templates, a checklist, and an evidence tracker for SaaS companies preparing for SOC 2.

If you’re building or running a CRM and customers are starting to ask about SOC 2, or you’re preparing for an audit and need a structured way to get ready, feel free to reach out.

Anybody ever build their own CRM? I’m thinking about it wondering about dev time quality product MVP finish product the whole nine.

I don't need that many features: simple UI, multiple users, managing contacts and setting client/project interaction reminders (including repeating ones aka "every week/every month") and see them as popup/in a list somewhere.

Should be self hostable. I'm not interested on relying on some third party service that will lure me, collect my contacts, bind me to themselves with a few shiny features and then change their tariffs so sneezing now suddenly costs 100$. I'm not interested in AI-first projects either.

Shouldn't be a freshly made one-man project.

And should be pretty lightweight.

So far I looked at:

• Clientverse - project seems too young. And everything that isn't absolute basic is in a premium package.
• EspoCRM - Reports, Business Process Management and Workflows are in an expensive Paid pack. UPD: Nvm they have a lot of features locked into packs.
• SuiteCRM - version 8 is horribly slow. Fails to install language packs.
• CiviCRM - very clunky UI and is clearly not meant for business.

UPD: Thanks everyone. I think I'll try to stick with Twenty for now. Workflows can be extended with logic functions which are a bit clunky, but they seem to work.

Im seeing AI sales coaching come up for field teams and I’m still not sure how well it works in real life. For leasing agents home builders or senior living reps the manager usually sees the CRM outcome but not the actual conversation. Seems useful in theory, but if reps hate recording or stop using it after a few weeks then it kind of defeats the point so my question is does anyone here use this with an in person sales team and how well does it work?

I’ve been experimenting with pulling public business data from Google Maps and enriching it with things like emails and owner information.

One thing I’m trying to figure out is which filters actually help identify businesses that are more likely to need marketing services.

For example:

• Rating
• Number of reviews
• How recently they received reviews
• Business category
• Website/no website
• Owner/contact information
• Location

For agency owners or anyone doing outbound B2B lead gen, what signals do you actually use before deciding a business is worth contacting?

I’m especially curious whether there are less obvious filters that have improved your response or close rates.

One dashboard, built in CRM, marketing, automations, workflows, reputation management, all client conversations across facebook, instagram, email, text all managed in the same place. This way you dont have to fill your business suite with 50 different softwares, tools and platforms. thought I'd just share the not so secret sauce today lol 😂

We’re a small B2B business with 6 people and sales is still pretty founder led, but revenue has grown enough that keeping leads, follow ups and customer conversations spread across spreadsheets and inboxes is starting to fall apart. I’m trying to figure out what the best CRM for a small business looks like when you need something the whole team can use without spending weeks setting it up.

I keep finding everything from really basic small business CRM tools to newer AI native CRM platforms, and I’m more interested in something that can take some of the sales work off the team rather than just becoming another database we have to maintain. Main thing is finding a CRM we can grow into without needing a dedicated ops person just to keep it running.