Lots of interesting answers here.

I do web design and dev part time with my co-founder. Grossed about 50k over the last couple years.

The type of website doesn’t seem to matter as much as the client. Universities, bigger business, govt will always pay more than a small business. Ideally your client isn’t paying you with money out of their pocket. i.e. you find a uni employee who has an arbitrary budget of 25k and you charge them 23.5k. Small businesses pay with their own pocket and will often go for cheaper price over quality.

We don’t do monthly maintenance. All sites are built either using a custom CMS or Squarespace. Clients can make their own edits and if something requires more than 30 mins of work, we can write them a separate proposal.

No advertising - word of mouth, doing a good job, working a bit under our pay grade, and smiling and saying yes to lots of things we don’t want to do. This has resulted in people getting referred to us at a somewhat okay pace. Once a client comes our way, we either give them a pitch about our services/experiences, or toss them a questionnaire to determine their needs. This is mostly intuition as we’ve developed a keen eye on which clients actually want work done and which just want to scratch an entrepreneurial itch.

It was mentioned in thread, but it’s most valuable to have a product/biz mindset as opposed to design/eng mindset. Know your customer and cater to them. Contrary to what’s been said here, most customers don’t give a shit about how quickly it takes their page to load - they want features, visuals, something to show and tell with friends, fam, and instagram. Know your audience and sell them what they want