Ravelry
👤 Casey (Cassidy) & Jessica Forbes (Self-taught Casey built Ravelry in 2006 for wife Jessica; community chipped in about $71K to keep them <em>small and independent</em>.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
Casey Forbes self-taught Rails to build a project tracker for his knitter wife Jessica — no VC, about 4-5 team, 11M+ members
Will it work? · our read
First in niche. No secret trick here: early timing, relentless community trust, and the discipline to stay tiny and take a small cut. Execution and patience won, not a clever hack.
01How the money moves
Crafters catalog projects, patterns & yarn — free
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Designers sell PDF patterns; fiber shops advertise to the community
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Designers pay a capped monthly fee on pattern sales (free up to $20/mo); shops buy ads
02The numbers
9M+ membersStatedrevenue never disclosed
the sentence on the page
it when they are considering a project. Our Community Ravelry is your new virtual fiber circle with over 9 million yarn-loving friends! You can pop into the forums to ask questions or chat about…
$28M is designer sales volume, not Ravelry's revenue; Ravelry keeps only about 3.5%. Member count 11M is third-party (2023); Ravelry's own About page states 'over 9 million.' Ravelry blog: How Ravelry Makes Money
Private and profitable since about 2008, on member-run ads plus a fee on pattern sales — and that fee is not a percentage: Ravelry's own blog says it runs "from free all the way up to $20 a month depending on sales volume", a capped monthly charge. Ravelry has never disclosed its revenue. The widely-cited $28M is designer pattern-sales GMV (2020, The New Yorker), not Ravelry's take.
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You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Ravelry: About (first-party)Ravelry blog: How Ravelry Makes Money (first-party)Signal v. Noise: Ravelry funded by its own community, 2008Wikipedia: Ravelry (cites the 2021 New Yorker piece for the $28M pattern-sales figure)
Ravelry has never disclosed its revenue, so there is no revenue figure here at all. Two things on this card were wrong until 13 July 2026 and are worth stating plainly. First, the headline said "11M+ members" and badged it STATED — as if Ravelry had said it. Ravelry has not: their own About page says "over 9 million yarn-loving friends", and the 11M came from a third-party stats blog. Our own metric row already called it an estimate, so the card contradicted itself. Second, we said Ravelry "keeps about 3.5% of pattern sales". It does not take a percentage: Ravelry's own post on how it makes money describes pattern-sale fees running "from free all the way up to $20 a month depending on sales volume" — a capped monthly charge — alongside ads, merchandise and affiliate commissions. The $28M is 2020 designer pattern-sales GMV reported by The New Yorker, not Ravelry's revenue and not its take. Team size (about 4-5) is first-party. The 2019 political ban and the 2020 redesign backlash are widely documented and summarised here. We never score you.