Unfortunately a lot of places are having to require people to stay at home due to the pandemic again. If you're new, or need to catch up, here's the original posts about why I did a bunch of free patterns for the pandemic, and the one about the post-lockdowns plan.
The aim of the Level Up patterns is the same
To teach people a useful and fun skill that can be done at home with/without kids and on a budget! I can't go back to the original plan of just making them free for a couple reasons: it really messes up my accounting (as in, all the extra blank orders make my admin time go from 'a couple of hours' to 'days'), and being able to offer free patterns here but not on Etsy makes some people extremely angry.
Here's why it isn't an option on Etsy:
I can't. Etsy has no 'free listing' option. It does have minimum item fees, so you can't list something for a really low price like .01, either. If I did that, I'd owe Etsy a LOT more than .01 each time someone got a pattern.
Nor can I write "Go to my website for everything in my Etsy shop, cheaper!" in listings. It is against their terms of service. It's like if you went to the grocery store and the apples had stickers that said 'come to our orchard and save!' I can (and do) suggest people come here to look at the free sewing tutorials, but that's it.
The new plan:
Instead of a 0 listing price, I'm making a coupon code on RequiemArt.com for a free pattern in the freebie section and adjusting the listing price to match Etsy. The result is still 0 (free) but it will reduce confusion.
I'm hoping this will reduce my admin work to something I can handle since it should cut down on the 'I don't even sew for that doll but it's free so why not' orders.
If this goes well, I will cycle other patterns I feel are useful through the freebie section. That way, if you didn't use the coupon code on a Level Up pattern, you can still use it and have a little something to look forward to. We all need that :)