>>> I mean, are you really going to make that much more than you would as a regular software engineer at a company?

Hell yeah.

I mean, what companies could they possibly work for? Google? Accenture?

These only have offices in a handful of cities across the planet. You have zero job prospects as a software engineer as a person living in countryside Asia or Latin America or even Europe outside of metro areas. You might as well try to build your own web business.