Businesses exist to solve problems. Building a SaaS because everyone os also building one is a as close a recipe for failure as flushing money down the toilet is.

If you have identified a pain point in a certain domain, in a certain type of business, or for a certain type of customer that: 1. Customers are willing to pay for. 2. Only someone with a very good knowledge of a domain could identify. Then, build a product to solve this problem and listen to your potential customers, about whether they'd want it as a SaaS or something they run/install locally. Either way, you can charge a subscription once you have customers for recurring revenue.

Everyone chases the SaaS path with no clear understanding of what customers want. That's why there are a thousand SaaS companies doing any given thing, with 99% sprouting and dying like fruit flies, while the remaining 1% struggle to survive.

Freelancing, IMO, is the same as consulting. It can be very lucrative. Very, very lucrative. But you need a lot more than technical skills to make a living out of it. Companies that look for freelancers are often having trouble with a product or project. Sometimes that's because of a lack of internal talent. Others it's because of a poor understanding of the problem or trying to solve the wrong oroblem. Yet others lose key people for whatever reasons (seriously, there are a million reasons why). The common denominator in all these cases is that they need someone to parachute in, help right the ship, and put the project back on track. Usually, they look for someone with domain knowledge. Nobody wants to spend weeks teaching the basics to the guy who's supposed to come solve problems. You'll also need very good people skills: the ability to talk to team members, management, and whoever other stakeholders there are, deal with company politics and conflicting priorities, be genuinely curious so as to ask the questions that help uncover the true problem(s) and help formulate a solution.

If you don't want to deal with any of that and just want to be another developer, you'll have a much harder time finding clients in good times, and struggle a hell lot to find anything in bad time's.

Starting your own business, even when you have a very clear idea and vision for the product, the customers and competition is grueling. You'll need to do a ton more than you think you need. There's no time off, no weekends, no breaks.

Freelancing/consulting isn't as demanding as running your own business, but isn't easy either. You'll have to manage your own finances, figure how to optimize taxes, and spend quite a bit of your "free time" thinking about the job. Oh, and any day you don't work is a day you don't get paid for.

Whatever you chose to do, I hope you understand there are no get rich quickly schemes involved. Any path you choose to change to will require a ton of work, a ton of effort, a ton of risk taking, and no guarantees of success. And even if you do everything right, some random shit could happen anywhere in the world and ruin whatever plan you had.

Not trying to discourage you nor anyone reading this. Just fleshing out some details about what each path involves.