{"id":458,"date":"2026-10-25T11:53:30","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T11:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.keywordrush.com\/blog\/?p=458"},"modified":"2026-10-25T11:53:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T11:53:30","slug":"static-crochet-pattern-shop-astro-cloudflare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.keywordrush.com\/blog\/static-crochet-pattern-shop-astro-cloudflare\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Built a Crochet Pattern Shop That Costs About $10 a Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I design small amigurumi animals: a frog, a hedgehog, a ladybug, a snail with a spiral shell. The usual place to sell patterns like these is a marketplace such as Etsy. I wanted a shop of my own as well, so I built Faunula, my amigurumi crochet pattern shop<\/a>, on a static site that costs me about $10 a year to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written in October 2026. Prices and free-plan limits below are as of that month.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post is about why I chose my own site, why a static one, what it costs and how fast it turned out. Serge and I run our IT business together, and his blog is read by people who run WordPress sites, so it seemed a good place to tell it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Faunula
The Faunula home page. Every pattern of the first collection can be read in full here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Why my own site, and not only a marketplace<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When you pay for ads on a marketplace, or send your Instagram followers to your shop there, you are mostly promoting the marketplace. The buyer remembers “I found it on Etsy”, and the next listing they open shows them other shops’ patterns next to yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rules also belong to the platform. They keep changing, and a shop can be suspended overnight, with all its reviews and sales history attached to it. I didn’t want everything I build to depend on a policy page I don’t control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still use Ravelry, just differently. A pattern listing there can link to my own site, so it works as a shop window that sends people to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downside is real. A marketplace brings buyers on day one; a new site starts with zero visitors, and you have to bring them yourself, with Pinterest and an email list. I think that work is worth it, because what it builds stays with you, but it is slower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to plain HTML pages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The part that surprised me most: the web started with static HTML pages, and after years of databases and page builders, here I am, back to static pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A static site is a folder of finished pages. Nothing is assembled when a visitor opens one: no database query, no plugin to run. The pages are built ahead of time, uploaded to a CDN, and served from the server nearest to the reader. Faunula isn’t static all the way through. The newsletter sign-up, the checkout notifications from Paddle, and the library where buyers download their PDFs run as small functions on Cloudflare, with a small database for subscribers and orders. Every pattern page, though, is a finished file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That fits a pattern shop well, because a crochet pattern is data. It has materials, a gauge, a finished size, and rounds with stitch counts that have to add up. I keep each pattern in one place, with every round and stitch count stored as data. From that source the build makes the free web page, the printable PDF, and seven language editions, including separate US and UK crochet terms. When I fix a stitch count, I fix it once, and every page and every PDF picks it up on the next build. The site itself is built with Astro<\/a>, which turns those files into plain HTML.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
One source for the butterfly: the web page, a page of the English PDF, and the same page in the German edition.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I wouldn’t recommend this for everything. If you run a blog or an affiliate site, publish every day, and rely on plugins for product boxes and comparisons, WordPress is still the better tool, and this blog runs on it. A static site works best when the content is structured and changes in batches, like a catalogue or a shop with your own products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No admin panel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Faunula has no CMS and no admin panel. I manage it through an AI agent. I tell it what to change, in text or by voice, or I give it a scan or a photo of a document. That could even be a pattern written on a napkin: the agent turns it into the structured data the pages are built from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once I filled in paper briefs for a pattern by hand and photographed them, and the agent read them and applied the changes to the pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing goes live without checks. Every build checks that each page has one main heading and its own canonical address, that every picture has alt text, and that internal links lead somewhere. Before a change is pushed, screenshots of every page at phone width also check that nothing scrolls sideways. If a check in the build fails, the old version simply stays online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What it costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here is the whole stack and what I pay for it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n