Hey everyone,

When I was in college, I used to wish to do some freelancing work to earn some amount.
But I never did it due to lack of experience and knowledge.

Now, I've been working in a Small IT company for one year and I'm confident enough that I can do it.

I'm interested in making APIs as a freelancer.
I've few doubts here,
Once the API is developed is it a freelancer's job to deploy it in some cloud instance or they just need to share the code?
If the client wants the freelancer to deploy it on their behalf then do the freelancer have to create his account for example in AWS for deployment?

Also, Do freelancers have to set up and maintain all the DB for the APIs?

by presumption the client don't know how to deploy the API nor how to setup a db ( w/ a few exceptions ofc. ), so yes all of that + setuping all accounts is the freelancer job, but w/ clients money ;]

Always create a document called “statement of work” (google it).

I’m there detail each responsibility and mention who is supposed to take care of those (you, client, or third parties) and get it signed BEFORE you start development.

This has saved my ass countless times.

My assumption: the client wants to pay for the thing working. Code that is not running does not work as far as they're concerned, so you have to make it run (and keep running) as well. So you should probably charge a recurring fee that covers the costs of keeping it up as well as performing maintenance.

I've never worked as a freelancer, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but it sounds reasonable to me.

There is alot to unpack.
I'm a full time freelancer.

First of all if you can avoid deploying or setting up production. You do that. The liability and risks are huge.
If you can't avoid that (usually happens if there is no maintainance team or you are at the maintainance team or the company is small or or or) then you need proper insurance (alot of insurance companies exclude things, read the contract and make no assumptions).
With insurance you try to split maintainance and development in sperarate contracts, because maintainance should be more expensive. No matter if one or more contracts each contract should state a maximum financial risk you bare. Mine are often around 1 mio $. And guess what you at least match that with your insurance.

Maintainance I usually do at a fixed montly rate maybe discounted if nothing needs to be done. Again read the contract and make no assumptions.

Insurance is for court, if you get sued they will do the fighting while you can work for other clients

@nururururu depends I have one client, who has a big maintainance team that monitors the application hourly. Huge DAX Company. There I have a staging dev system and I have to document every thing needed for installation. I do k8s so terraform apply and helm install/upgrade commands for me.
I even have to detail the wanted output on console or a check that everything is fine. Maintainance will call me sunday, which is annoying if I mess up or they don't understand something (k8s is new to them).

For small/mid size clients, my experience match your assumptions. You make it work, which is a huge responsibility and backup management all shenanigans.