I don't force them to make any decision. How am I exploiting them?You're entering into an agreement in bad faith, intending to alter the terms of the agreement once they're more committed and at a disadvantage.
Additionally, you're blatantly lying about your skill level, how long something will take, and the state of the market, in the hopes that you can find a sucker every now and then who will believe you.
This is fraud, pure and simple.
Imagine you hire a contractor to remodel your bathroom for $10k. As soon as they demo the bathroom, they lie and say they found a bunch of unexpected issues that will cost $50k to fix, and that anyone else who knows what they're doing will cost at least $100k, when the reality is that anyone honest would be able to just do the original job for $10k.
Sure, many people see through this ruse and will tell them to get lost and hire someone else (or at least get more bids), but some won't, and that's what the bottom-feeders who pull this shit are counting on.
Most people end up with less money, not because they lack skill but because they've not used their skill at the right place at right time.
Of course, and I regularly advise freelancers and contractors to charge more and to charge for value, not for time.
But that's distinct from lying to your clients and finding ways to put them in disadvantageous positions where you can exploit them. That's short-term scammer thinking.
For the record, I regularly make an effective hourly rate of more than $500 / hr, although I never charge hourly.
Here's the ethical win-win way to get to the same (or better result) vs. what you're doing:
1. First, establish some expertise and credibility in a particular space. You don't have to be the best in the world, but you need some results to show how you can solve a client's business problems in a particular area. The more expensive / valuable those problems are, the better.
2. Find clients who have that problem and give them a quote based on the value that you're adding, not the time that you're investing.
3. Over time, you can optimize, outsource, automate, and eliminate the work that you need to do in order to deliver that value, while simultaneously charging more as your expertise and credibility grows. This drives your effective hourly rate up on two factors.
The end result is that you can get a client who will hire you for $50k to do something worth $250k to them that will take you 100 hours ($500 / hr effective) and at the end, you'll both walk away happy, increasing the likelihood that you'll work together again in the future.
It's more work, but pays off better in the long run. Plus the side benefit of making you seem and feel like less of a scummy fraudster.