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Comment by Uberphallus | Hacker News Reader

Mechanical keyboards are great. Fell in love with an M 20 years ago, and wanted the same feeling. There are great models under $100 that will last you forever. I have 3: 1 at work, 1 at home, and 1 BT for the media center. That's it. Never replaced them, I just got them not to move keyboards around.

The rest I agree. It's like the audiophile business. Drop basically turns every consumer product line into an exclusive, elitist, better than you, brag in front of your bros marketplace with absurd margins. Keycaps are the worst offender, they're the cheapest thing in the whole keyboard to manufacture yet they get sold for... hundreds??!? Hard pass on all that.

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Boutique keycaps are expensive because small-run injection molding is always expensive. I'm not at all sure they're the cheapest part of the whole keyboard, I would bet the case is probably cheaper.

> small-run

Yeah, that's the excuse, but seems like every batch is small-run, limited release, exclusive collectors edition, but somehow more and more stock keeps coming back over time. They're expensive even by Warhammer standards, but at least Warhammer figures have detailed work from an artist on them.

> I would bet the case is probably cheaper.

You're right on that, actually.

>Yeah, that's the excuse, but seems like every batch is small-run, limited release, exclusive collectors edition, but somehow more and more stock keeps coming back over time.

I can all but guarantee you that fancy custom keycaps are rarely going to be done in runs big enough to have the economies of scale drive down the cost of tooling. Particularly with double shots and the like, those molds are extremely expensive. I don’t doubt that the products are luxury priced, but I think you might be surprised by what the costs are here.

I don't think it's necessarily tooling economies of scale, but probably custom-order costs-- rather than cranking out 5000 standard US QWERTY sets, you have to swap between five different toolings and run 50 sets of each. Even if tooling's free, there's a cost in the short runs and switching.

From what I've seen, a typical new keycap set is 90% existing tooling in a new colour-wave, and 1-10 completely new legends, usually that define the theme (there are seemingly 300 sets with Hiragana sublegends, but this one will have a Windows-logo key replaced with the Strawhat Pirate flag!)

I suspect there are efficencies to be found by pooling overlapping orders and reducing nonstandard kitting. Saying "everyone gets the 3/£ keycap" adds 20 cents per order, rather than making a few UK users buy a low-economies-of-scale kit at $25.

I've been fond of Maxkey's caps-- they seem to have achieved that accidentally. They seem to sell one basic cover-all set in different colours, and as a result they have pretty good supply and modest prices (their sets sell for about USD100, I suspect anything similar from Signature Plastics would cost 150 or 200, and have a 12 month turnaround)

Just go on ebay, you can find great pbt double-shot keycaps for ~$20 or even less, usually shipped from China. The enthusiast shops only carry the most expensive stuff.

Care to share your favorite sub $100 keyboard?

In terms of cheap, I run the redragon K40 at $40.

ducky keyboards are around the $90-$120 range mostly, depending on the model you get. I think they're a great option for a high quality but non-exotic keyboard

Not OP, but I've been using a Durgod Taurus K320 TKL for two years as my primary work keyboard with no problems. I like it quite a bit.

Been running Noppoo Choc since it came out, got two of them. Newer Noppoo Lolita Spyder had the same feeling but didn't award being bought. At work a colleague has a Drevo Tyrfing V2, too much LED but it has a good touch too.

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