DFWJ Freebies, Shop and Membership Explained

This site contains affiliate links from which we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!

I am finally getting around to explaining how my freebies, shop, and membership are going to work this year!

I started blogging many many years ago… I looked it up in my web hosting dashboard and I found that I started my earliest blog in 2006!!! That’s 19 years ago!! That blog was called something different and was more focused on homeschooling and homemaking. Once I started quilting, I decided to close that one down and start Days Filled With Joy.

My Current Website

As you can imagine, a lot has changed in the blogging world since then. I started this blog back in 2009 for free on Blogger. When I wanted to start sharing designs and printables, I couldn’t do that with Blogger – so I purchased my own domain and started paying for web hosting.

What started at $2.95 a month for hosting with unlimited storage, slowly but steadily rose to $35 a month. (And DH started freaking out!!) Then the hosting company decided they were not going to give unlimited storage anymore… and my plan is going to go up again!!!

I have written 1180 blog posts… and have over 6450 media items (photos, graphics, downloads). To try to clean up my storage would take me months if not years!

So, to try to combat the rising costs and keep blogging I put on ads…. I know, they are horrible, but they help pay the website costs. Thank you for putting up with them.

I then decided to stop putting my downloads on this website and put it on an outside platform – to keep it more organized and to stop my hosting costs from going up even more.

My Teachable Account

It took a lot of consideration to use an outside platform, but in the end, I decided to host all my freebies on the Teachable platform. This also costs a monthly fee, but I love the format and ease of use. I like that I can put all my freebies up there in one place, easy to find. I am still going through this site finding the freebies, changing the links in the blog posts, and putting the files in the Freebies section.

The Membership

This is the second time I decided to start a membership. The first time was a different model – it was a monthly subscription and I had a lot of new content going up every month. It was too hard for me to keep up.

So this time I decided to put everything that was for sale on Etsy in the membership and have one yearly price of $37. I thought that this would be affordable for most people, and cheaper in the end – rather than buying one BOM, you get everything!

I still put up new content every month, but I feel less pressure, and if my members don’t want to renew again for another year, then that is fine.

I want to be offering more value than is expected…. I recently saw a quilting membership that was charging $37 a month!! And nearly fell off my chair… I can’t imagine many people would be able to afford that… no matter how good the content is.

I realize that someone can join for $37 and download everything (worth over $200!) and then cancel their membership. That is ok! I’ve blessed them with a great bargain…. and if they choose to continue the membership for another year or more, then that blesses me and helps me pay for the Teachable platform. And they get more patterns, etc while they are still members.

As with everything we do in the blogging world, there is trial and error. We will see how this works this year, but I feel much better about this model than the previous one.

My Etsy Shop

I know that there will be some people who will not want to join the membership because they might only want one pattern – and they will balk at paying $37 for it even though it comes with everything else.

I totally understand this and so I have decided to restart my Etsy shop, but with a limited amount of designs and printables.

When I was selling our designs and printables on Etsy I was trying to keep the prices low. But that meant I was losing most of the profit to Etsy fees and exchange rate fees.

So I am now going to bundle designs together and sell them for a higher price in order to cover the fees.

In the end, it will be cheaper for the purchaser as well, because instead of paying $5 for a block for a total of $45 for the whole BOM, I will sell them all in one listing for a lower price which means cheaper for the buyer and less fees for me.

I hope this all makes some sense!!!!

I want to continue giving as much as I can away for free, but I also need to be able to cover my blogging costs. And if I can manage to cover some of my fabric purchases then that is a bonus!

The Freebies Section

When you go to the Freebies section for the first time, it will ask you to sign up for them. You will need to give them your name and email. That is just how the system works. Most websites these days ask for those details. But you will not have to pay anything.

Some of the freebies will be forever free – some will be free for a limited time. This will be clear in the blog post that sends you to the freebie.

Going Forward

• I will be slowly working on putting up the previous BOMs as a single pattern on Etsy and bundling other designs. (The shop is empty right now.)
• I will continue to upload new content to the membership
• I will continue to load freebies into the freebie area and change blog post links

As you can imagine, this will take time….. I won’t have to change all 1180 posts (phew!) but there will be a lot of broken links that will need fixing.

I’d like to thank all of you for being my faithful readers and blog friends. I truly consider you my friends from all over the world, and really, my blog family!

I’m looking forward to sharing a fun year full of joy, planning, stitching, and quilting with you!