For context: I'm a full-time dev at a startup and I moonlight as a freelance dev on the side (10 - 20 hours per week).

I currently do free first-time-meetings / consultations. The problems I'm experiencing are threefold:

1. A lot of people who ask to meet me simply don't have any budget (and they're expecting me to work for equity or some extremely low wage). They get the free consult, but there's no real chance of them engaging with me.

2. A few would-be clients dwell in that consultation-stage for far too long (they call me, text me, email me back and forth, and get all the free advice they can, and they don't seem particularly motivated to move beyond that stage).

3. I end up giving a lot of consultations to folks who are simply shopping for price-quotes. This is pretty much a waste of time for me because I charge an order of magnitude more than the lowest quotes they're going to receive. I can't blame them for comparing prices, it's just not usually worth my time to have those kinds of conversations.

So, I'm looking for ways to start pre-qualifying my leads earlier on in the pipeline; before the consultation stage. I'd like to figure out how to sift out the un-desirable leads without having to flat-out ask "So how much money do you have for this project?"

One idea is to charge for consultations; at a pretty arbitrary but 'painful' level (100 bucks, 500 bucks, a grand, whatever). Does anyone here do something similar? If not, how do you prequalify your leads? If it matters, my ideal engagement-level is 25k - 50k per project.

Thanks for any advice