What do you provide for 1000 bucks that someone else doesn't provide for 300 and that's worth the 700 difference?
Photography
A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.
This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.
Digitech minimum rate is $500 in NYC and the EQ rate is $500 or way more according to the recent survery.
What is DigiTech? On site IT services? Post production and editing?
You mentioned ASMP. Did you join as a member and put your information in the Find an Assistant database? If an ASMP photographer wants to hire an assistant that they aren't already connected with, that's where they are going to look.
Same applies to APA. These are paid professional membership organizations. Networking happens within the organization. If everyone goes outside of the organization, the the benefits of membership are reduced.
Wonderful Machine reps photographers. Many of those photographers are members of ASMP, APA, and other professional organizations. It is not to their benefit to respond to solicitation emails from you, much less to hire you instead of hiring someone from within their professional organizations.
They are useless. I've been part of both ASMP and APA for a long time but after I researching photographers, I found them not useful and not really active.