Uh, I did it with a parent I could live with and no real responsibilities. For you to do it now, as an established adult, it starts with 6-9 months of living expenses in the bank. You can't skip this step. Contracts pay slowly, and you'll have unexpected expenses.

You have two ways to start: product and service. If you're going the product route, you're gambling that you know about an unserved niche that enough people will pay you to serve. If you don't know what that is, your months of living expenses turn into a very stressful sabbatical. You probably know a lot about how this works if you've worked for small companies or startups for any length of time, but you need to ask yourself all the hard questions about your skillset. There's the obvious questions, like can you really do both design and tech, do you know how to deploy on a shoestring budget, do you know how to get solid observability and feedback channels. There's the less obvious questions, like do you know the data collection laws for overseas users, do you know how to keep your own books, do you know how to make marketing materials to target people who aren't like you, etc.

If you're going the service route, you may as well keep your day job until you have your first client lined up. You don't want to peddle your services on job boards like Fiverr if you can avoid it. You don't have the reputation to compete on much besides price when you're starting out. It can be fine to fill gaps between "real" jobs once you're really going, but never start there. Local clients are best. You'll have to learn the language of marketing. Your ideal customer doesn't even know why it matters that you know Java and AWS or whatever your tools of choice are, because when you're a new freelance dev, you don't have the clout to court major corporate clients. You're looking for something like restaurants who really ought to have a website, or small businesses who can make payroll consistently but need to start automating things, or startups who need some temporary reinforcements. That's how you find your niche. It's like going viral on social media and now that's what your account is about. The thing that people pay you to do and you get back to get paid for it a second time? That's you now.

I don't recommend the life, to be entirely honest. I did it to prove myself, but I was happy to turn it back into a corporate gig in the end. That doesn't mean it's terrible, though. You eat steak in the good months and ramen in the bad months. You get a lot of stories. You get a lot of freedom. You'll learn things that your coworkers will really appreciate when you're ready to give it up.