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Comment by joncrane | Hacker News Reader

>There are people out there doing 6 figures selling artisanal mechanical keyboard keycaps

Source?

The actual numbers would definitely be a guess out of thin air, but the mechanical keyboard community is pretty massive and spends a bunch of money on this stuff.

Here's a drop that is currently at 88k revenue for massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-redsuns-gmk-red-samu...

638 purchases @ 139.99/set

Somebody has dropped 1k on a single custom made key on the secondary market. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/keyboard_t...

The gaming market has produced all sorts of hobbyist businesses, and that's a market actually big enough to see a few potentially billion dollar businesses. I'm not entirely sure whether something like DXRacer[0] would fall into line of a hobbyist/enthusiast business but it feels like it should to me (and I'm mentioning it because it feels like a larger sort of hobbyist business). It's definitely in that realm in terms of having a pretty specific target market and a relatively higher price point.

[0] https://www.dxracer.com/

I'm one of those people who admittedly spend way too much money on keyboards :) I don't have any artesian keycaps, but I have bough aftermarket (?) keycaps that uses plastic of a higher quality. You can tell the difference.

There are also people in the DIY mechanical keyboard market selling circuit boards, plates, cases, etc... Again, it's a really niche market, but people are willing to spend a lot more money at a hobbyist/enthusiast level.

>I don't have any artesian keycaps

Artisanal. Artesian means related to a special type of water wells :-)

‘Artisan’ in the MK community.

`Bespoke` in the marketing community.

I'm there too, I have 4 $100+ keyboards now, and 1 of them is an "ortholinear" style (keys are in a perfect grid) that I built from a kit and had custom keycaps printed with names of programs on them. With some semi-custom software I use it like a physical "whole computer" shortcut pad.

I now have a button that can launch a terminal window, a button that launches HN, one that does a git pull on all my current projects, etc...

Like you said, it's a niche market, but it's one where most people are happy to pay the higher prices for something more tailored to their needs, and it's a rare "physical" area where a guy in his garage can compete with big companies.

I just recently got a new 3d printer, and I think after I get it more tuned I will be able to print fairly good quality keycaps. If they are good enough, I might try selling custom made-to-order keycaps if there is any interest.

Where can you get custom printing on keycaps? I have an Ergodox but what I really can't get used to (even after 2 years of full time use) is the lack of labeling for the special keys. I've looked for years for ways to do custom printing or labeling but all methods I found suck.

WASDkeyboards offers printed singles in multiple ways. They aren't the best quality (they are UV coated ABS, I used their keycaps on another keyboard and the coating started to wear through after about a year of daily use, the text is still fine though), but they are the king of custom printing right now in my opinion.

You can go to [0] to get just text on a keycap with a fairly easy web-ui to describe the text, position, and size you want it.

Or you can take it entirely into your own hands and go to [1] to give them a vector file that they will custom print on to the keys.

They also offer that service in a "full keyboard set" option [2], so you don't need to do a ton of keys individually if you want to do the whole keyboard (although the full sets most likely won't fit your profile, but they do fit a good number of more standard keyboard layouts)

Again, they aren't the best quality, but they do a good job, and they take care of their customers. Plus the amount of customization you can do is pretty fucking insane. [3] is always my go-to example for just how customizable they are. Not only full color printing, but also individual key plastic color selection.

[0] http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/printed-keyc...

[1] http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/printed-keyc...

[2] http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-set/1...

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/wasdkeyboards/28965975050/

roel_v just buy some right sized blanks in your profile and use a paint pen to label them, or get some relegendable caps in your profile and make little paper labels.

That or just dump the ergodox when you realize that it's just a pale sad imitation of a kinesis advantage.

I am not parent commenter but you can pry my ErgoDox EZ Shine from my cold dead hands.

The one you mentioned doesn’t even look pretty. ErgoDox EZ Shine is wonderful both in use and in how it looks!

That set is actually produced by GMK, a large-ish German company [0]. There is a designer who gets a cut (I'm not sure the percentage off the top of my head), but it's almost definitely not enough to live off of.

[0] https://www.gmk-electronic-design.de/en.html

I don't have a source, but I wouldn't be surprised. I used to make custom fighting sticks (I even designed the firmware, which for me was the most fun part) and sold them north of $300 each. They were gone really fast. I didn't continue because it was time consuming and we just had a son :)

Why did your fighting sticks have firmware?

Aren't all sticks made out of firmware?

But I, too, am very curious to hear the answer.

Fighting sticks - like gamepads for fighting games, maybe?

https://www.frys.com/product/8805412

“Fightsticks” - joysticks for fighting games - often have the ability to program macros into their buttons, so as to make it easier to pull off the lengthy input sequences these games are built around.

Oh... it's basically a joystick. Fight stick -> arcade like joystick that is usually used on fighting games.

The firmware was basically usb-hid to behave like either joystick or keyboard. It also had some fancy de-bouncing code for the buttons.

I mean it isn't like any of these makers are sharing their tax returns or anything, but for example eat_the_food is the designer and manufacturer behind "Nightcaps" [0]. He ran an event called "Poisoned summer" where he had 80 days of "micro batch" sales, where each sale was for somewhere between one and fifteen or so caps, priced between $60-80 each. Most days the sale was only open for about one minute, and in that minute he would have hundreds of entries to randomly draw "winners" from, and then the winners would get to buy the keycaps. I'm pretty sure he hit six figures in sales on those 80 days of sales alone, and those were not his only sales throughout the year. He isn't even making keycaps full-time yet, he still has a day job.

Several other members of the mechanical keyboard community (especially in the artisan keycap subsection of the community) have managed to turn their keyboard hobby into a full-time job and make a pretty decent living out of it.

[0] https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79513.0

Most of these keycap sets are kinda pricey, and this company is apparently doing pretty well.

https://pimpmykeyboard.com/

How are they not getting replaced by chinese manufacturers? From a naive point of view those don't seem to hard to manufacture.

Some are, some aren't (e.g. KeyCool). Lots of these have low production counts.

Maxkey, Tai Hao and others in the chinese market are making their presence felt, but generally the quality just isn't there for the enthusiast community.

Tai Hao is really coming into their own with the Cubic keycap profile. They're doing for keycaps what Kailh is doing for switches.

They are, but from the low end. Often the quality is not quite there: the colors are off, the legends and not properly aligned, the plastic is warped, the keys not quite aligned, and so on. It is probably because the production runs are so small that the only way to make a decent profit is to order a blind production run and ship it out no matter what it looks like. Higher-quality low-cost options are starting to appear as this new market matures.

In contrast, the group buys in the enthusiast community are works of love, with multiple rounds of checks and adjustments to get it right. Sometimes facilitators like Massdrop force projects out the door because of cost even though the creator of the design wants to do more rounds of tweaking are necessary, and it shows. (Example: the recent /dev/tty keycap set.)

They are, XDA keycap form factor is from a Chinese factory IIRC and is kinda derivative of DSA caps which comes out of Signature Plastics.

Seems to be quality issues with every XDA run so far though. Keyboard fanatics drop a good amount of money on these sets so quality is extremely important in such a small and passionate market.

Jelly Key makes artisan keycaps by hand. They are based in Vietnam.

https://www.jellykey.com/

This kind of thing seems perfect for group buys like massdrop, etc. Low production runs of these have got to be expensive. after all, they need to create the design, molds, form them, QA (hopefully), etc. Honestly that much money for some little plastic squares kinda makes me do a double-take, even though I realize why they cost what they do.

Most of the time there aren't that many custom molds (they are expensive!). There are generally only a few ways caps get made. Most expensive is "Double Shot", two separate colors of plastic is used, first the legend is molded in one color (kinda built on a grid of plastic) then it's placed in the full keycap mold and the "background" plastic is shot into the mold filling all the empty space. The legends on these keycaps obviously cannot fade or wear off. Other methods include "pad printing", the legends are painted on (with a coat of sealent) (if you look at your caps and kinda see a shimmer around your legends, it's probably pad printed). Pad printed legends can be worn off over time. Finally dye-sublimation, a printing method that penetrates the plastic a few nanometers. These legends generally don't wear off ( The popular Apple Extended II keyboard is dyesubbed, I have one that I used for several years on a quadra then converted for use with usb and the legends are still sharp, though the plastic has yellowed ), however dyesub can only create legends that are darker than the keycap plastic.

The companies that make keycaps have molds for the profiles they make. GMK has the original Cherry molds (medium height caps with cylindrical indentions, Signature Plastics has a few profiles including Retro looking SA (Tall caps with spherical indentations, each row a different sculpt that gives it a gentle dish when looked at from the side), DSA (flat profile, each row the same with a spherical indentation), DSS (A medium profile generally dished with spherical indentation, DCS (a medium profile with cylindrical indentation), and G20 (a flat profile with no indentation).

So generally when you put together a custom keycap set, you pick a profile, if you want double shot legends there might be some extra molds to make, but those are pretty pricy (I think I heard about 6k a pop). If you go with dyesub you have a lot of legend freedom, but you are limited to dark legends on lighter caps.

Most expensive is "Double Shot", two separate colors of plastic is used, first the legend is molded in one color (kinda built on a grid of plastic) then it's placed in the full keycap mold and the "background" plastic is shot into the mold filling all the empty space. The legends on these keycaps obviously cannot fade or wear off.

Yes. HP calculators had that.

There's another way for small volume. Laser engrave the legend with a CNC laser cutter. Then brush on laser marking powder, which is very similar to printer toner. Rerun the engraving pass at very low power, hitting the same spots just engraved. Power has to be low, just enough to melt and seal the toner, not vaporize it. Then brush off any remaining powder. This is good for cover plates with legends, signs, and such. The letters are slightly below surface level, so they tend not to wear off too fast.

This is the customer facing business for a plastics factory that specializes in keycaps called Signature Plastics. They've been one of two manufacturers of note in the custom keycap group buys of the last little while (GMK in germany being the other). Their production backlog right now is apparently pretty long.

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