🎯 The business: you build the websites and web apps that UK and German agencies sell to their clients, under their name. Agencies constantly take on more than their staff can build, and a reliable American developer who answers email in their afternoon is worth paying for. Nothing ships; you invoice in dollars or euros.
Design and marketing agencies with five to fifty people in London, Manchester, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. They pay $50 to $110 an hour for subcontracted development, or fixed prices of $3,000 to $25,000 per site, and they come back monthly once you have delivered twice on time. Some will put you on a retainer for maintenance across all their client sites.
| LLC filing (state average) and EIN | $130 |
| Domain, portfolio site, email | $30 to $200 |
| Contract template (SCORE or a one-hour attorney review) | $0 to $300 |
| Stripe and Wise accounts for dollar, pound and euro invoices | $0, fees per payment |
| Design and project tools, three months | $150 |
| All-in | ≈ $300 to $800 |
Build three portfolio pieces in the style agencies actually sell (a clean brochure site, a Shopify or WooCommerce build, a web app front end). Write to forty agencies with a two-paragraph email: who you are, two links, your hourly rate, your working hours in their time zone. Offer the first small job at a fixed price with a deadline you beat. Ask for a second job before the first is paid.
At $70 an hour and 25 billable hours a week, you gross about $7,000 a month working alone with no inventory and no shipping. Two steady agencies fill that. A second developer at $35 to $45 an hour doubles capacity while you sell and review. Payment in pounds or euros through Wise costs about 1 percent, far less than a bank wire.
No license. A written contract that names the governing law, the payment terms and who owns the code. UK and EU clients may ask for a data processing agreement under GDPR when you touch their customers’ data; a template exists for this. Services exported from the U.S. are generally not subject to export licensing, but check if the client is in a sanctioned country or on a restricted list.
Scope creep on fixed-price work. An agency that pays at ninety days. A client who disappears mid-project. The time-zone advantage becomes a disadvantage if you take evening calls every night. The developers who last work with three or four agencies, never one, and bill on milestones.