Thomas Baart (of splitkb.com fame) dives into group buys:
Group buys are still used as a business model, but its popularity is dwindling quickly. Why is that, and is that justified?
Interesting read!
My guess would be because it takes years for the actual product to get sent out. No one’s got patience for that.
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
I’m just disheartened on the number of otherwise beautiful keycap sets that fail to use symbology for special keys. I’m talking shift, tab, enter, backspace, caps lock, num lock, home, end, page up, page down…
I’ve even seen arrow keys that use Up, Down, Left, Right and it makes me sad.
That’s just wrong.
I joined one group buy for keycaps. Took 3 years! Switched to Topre keyboards. Now I either need to buy new sliders or sell the keycaps.
Group buys are absolutely not for me.
I’m looking for unix keycaps, I’ll end up designing them myself and having them printed.
At about 150 dollars at most, it’s probably the simplest way to get what I want. Must simpler than endlessly waiting for a group to come up with what I want.
I’ve done a couple of boards worth of lasering dye-sublimation markers into PBT keycaps. It comes out pretty nice, and blanks from Amazon or AliExpress are cheap.
This is a really good read, thanks for sharing it! I’m currently in the process of deciding how to move forward with the sale of the keyboard I designed so this is all really relevant information for me.
