Build fast. Own the data. Own the niche.

Across all six roles we track, specialty is applied as a straight multiplier on the base experience band. It is the cleanest signal in the dataset because it is the one input a contractor fully controls.

An AI/ML specialty carries a 28% premium. Fintech follows at 18%, healthcare at 12%, and general SaaS product work at 10%. Everything else prices at baseline.

In dollar terms on a senior full-stack band, that spread is the difference between $145/hr and $186/hr for work that is, structurally, the same engineering. The premium is not paid for the code. It is paid for knowing which code not to write.

The practical read: a generalist chasing a raise gets more leverage from picking a vertical than from another two years of tenure.

We index every market against Remote US at 1.00. That choice matters: remote is no longer the discount tier, it is the reference price.

San Francisco prices 24% above the remote baseline. Minneapolis prices 7% below it. That is a 31-point spread — and a San Francisco contractor bills 33% more than a Minneapolis one for the same deliverable, in the same timezone band, on the same stack.

The interesting half is the middle. Chicago (0.98) and Austin (0.95) now sit within a few points of remote, which means the traditional second-tier tech-city premium has effectively been arbitraged away. The premium survives only where the cost of living makes it structural.

We build from Minneapolis on purpose. A 7% discount on billing against a metro-average cost base is the arbitrage — it is why a two-person margin target of 86% is reachable here and not in the Bay.

Run a senior full-stack developer — $145/hr at baseline — through each lever independently and the outcome is close to a tie.

Relocate Minneapolis to San Francisco: +33%. Stay put and pick up an AI/ML specialty: +28%. Five points apart, on two decisions with wildly different costs.

Because our multipliers compound rather than add, doing both is the outlier case: $145 base × 1.28 specialty × 1.24 market lands at $230/hr, a 59% lift. That combination is the top of the modelled range, and it is rare precisely because most people treat these as alternatives rather than a stack.

The asymmetry is the point. Geography is a lever you pull once, expensively, and cannot easily reverse. Specialty compounds, travels, and survives a market correction. If you only get one, take the one that follows you.