In my experience (doing consulting/freelance work for a few years now), you have to get away from "freelance" kinds of jobs into "consulting". The terms are not well defined and there's a lot of overlap. But generally consulting seems to imply jobs where the client is relying on your judgment and you're responsible for the project as a whole. Freelancing is more about doing narrowly-scoped pieces of technical work.

Sites like Toptal mostly offer freelance type jobs, and there's a lot of price competition among freelancers.

For consulting work, clients don't think twice about paying $200/hour, even when the actual technical work is pretty straightforward. Higher rates are definitely possible if you have specialized skills and/or find the right clients. But you can really only find these jobs through personal connections.

if you want to make $250k, you need to charge much closer to $250/hr. Billing hours as a contractor or consultant is not the same as working hours as a FTE. You need to basically figure you’re going to average 20 hours/week to cover non-billable time, leave, taxes, etc.

The good news is that clients paying these rates will actually listen to you rather than treat you as a cog in a machine. (Another reason i prefer the term “consultant” to “contractor”)

Work in a more of a niche. Development in of itself is not a niche, and web development is but doesn’t pay as much freelance.

Setting up and configuring and managing firewalls and automation around them? $200+/hr. Setting up CI/CD pipelines, build processes, automated notifications, vulnerability scanning, and logging? $200+/hr.