$50 sounds low to me--I'm not on the sales side, but I'm told that $75 is closer to the minimum for, e.g. a Ruby skillset, and many shops, such as my employer, charge much more--but yes, at that rate you're better off going local, particularly for the colocation benefits.

Estimate that ~half to ~one third of your time is actual billable time. The rest is finding clients / business junk / expenses. So $50/hr is unsustainably low as a freelancer in the USA.

As a salaried position, it's plenty of course...

There is a lot to business than just hourly billing. If you are running a big company. Real estate, paying support services, insurance and other side costs also matters.

All these side expenditure and head ache in managing them saps a lot of money and people.

A lot of people feel its better to some money and have others do it for you. Than you doing it. Especially if that job is not your company's core expertise.

That's if you billed 2k hours a year, that's 100k revenue.

After corporate/employment type taxes and run of the mill expenses you would not incur as an employee, that's about 80k.

80k for lawyer-hours is not worth it. (2000 billable hours is a common law firm quota)

(To bill 2000 hours a year, you have to work much more like 3-5k hours, really expect to bill more between 1200-1600).

I suspect, depending on region, there are good programmers also willing to work for a bit less. The economy has hit a lot of people, but in some areas of the US, $40ish an hour is comparable to $75+/hr here in the Bay Area -- based on cost of living.

Not that people should undersell themselves, but there are smart people around this country that may be looking for a gig that are losing out on services like Elance/Odesk (if they even know about them) because $15/hr sounds like a good deal.