There is a lot of people from US here on HN so you should clarify that you talking about salaries after tax. E.g $1000 in Russia would be the same as $2000 in the US since employer pays 33-49% of salary as taxes.
In my home town called Rostov-on-Don (10th largest city in Russia) I have friends who make $2500-3000 after tax for their software engineer and devops positions. Some of these people are far from being a rockstar developers, just have well-paid positions at large companies. Average salary is somewhat lower, but it's still good money here since living costs are low.
PS: Family of 3 can basically live there for $1500 / month with rent, food and entertainment and if you single even $600 is quite sufficient.
Another interesting fact: if you're freelance software developer in Russia who work remotely for western company and register as entrepreneur then your efficient tax rate at most is 8% for fees and taxes. Then let's say 1% extra for banking and accounting, etc. So you basically keep more than 90% of income.
And there is even lower tax rate options available if you work alone and earn between $10,000-80,000 / year. You just pay fixed amount of taxes every year for special "patent" which cost e.g $400 / year in my home city. Then efficient tax rate gonna be like 1-5% depend on how much you earn. Though unlike when paying 7% of income this might require more detailed accounting since tax department can always ask you to show some documents. Officially "patent" allow you to pay $400 just once for income up to $600,000 / year but obviously in real life you gonna get some tough questions from tax department.
In any case tax rates for freelance software developers in Russia are very very low. Also unlike what western person might expect all government services are available online and accounting is no-brainer because Russia have some of the best fintech in the world.
TLDR: Russia's IRS/HRMC equivalent digitized VAT collection (similar to sales tax). Basically every 90 seconds all tills/cash registers across the country report back the sale to the taxman, so you don't even have to manually submit any VAT returns.
Russia started with 20% tax gap between revenue due and revenue collected (while e.g. UK is at 9.1%), and now after this they are on 1%.
My understanding it's almost real-time tax reporting with millions of tills acting as IoT devices sending data up.
Russia also have instant payments for consumers between all major banks which are free for first ~$1400 / month (100,000 RUB) and it's should be soon available for businesses as well. It's all run by central bank.
For fintech there is Tinkoff bank which is more advanced than Monzo / Revolut / N26 / etc as well as two "virtual" B2B fintech banks that even do accounting for entrepreneurs on their own. And to be honest even Russian largest state-owned Sberbank is far more advances than most of institutions in US and EU.
So as long as your business can't be forcefully taken away and there are no political risks it's quite comfortable to be freelancer when it's come to taxes.
In my home town called Rostov-on-Don (10th largest city in Russia) I have friends who make $2500-3000 after tax for their software engineer and devops positions. Some of these people are far from being a rockstar developers, just have well-paid positions at large companies. Average salary is somewhat lower, but it's still good money here since living costs are low.
PS: Family of 3 can basically live there for $1500 / month with rent, food and entertainment and if you single even $600 is quite sufficient.