I’ve been in this hobby since 2015 and at first I gawked at the price of custom keyboards back then. Even GMK sets at $100 a piece seemed insane to me and I choose to opt into building cheaper builds so. KBD Tofu was probably one of the cheapest and most available builds back then compared to now.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money to build a nice keyboard, but I do think once you’ve narrowed on the type of switches you enjoy the comes with a higher expense. If you want to go your own route and start lubing/customizing your favorite switches. You need a lot of time and money to buy the lube. But, I generally opt out on just buying them already l+f by someone else.
The other part of it too, is a lot of readily available keyboards just look the same. There isn’t anything wrong with that, but if you want something a little bit more special you’ll have to pay for it. For example, one of the TKL’s that really caught my eye was the Saevus Duality and that keyboard is around $600. Multiple parts, different weights, and the samples probably cost a lot. To me it’s basically a customizable piece of ‘art’ and I can those little things that I enjoy that make it my ‘own’ such as switches, stabs, and keycaps.
I’ve been in this hobby since 2015 and at first I gawked at the price of custom keyboards back then. Even GMK sets at $100 a piece seemed insane to me and I choose to opt into building cheaper builds so. KBD Tofu was probably one of the cheapest and most available builds back then compared to now.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money to build a nice keyboard, but I do think once you’ve narrowed on the type of switches you enjoy the comes with a higher expense. If you want to go your own route and start lubing/customizing your favorite switches. You need a lot of time and money to buy the lube. But, I generally opt out on just buying them already l+f by someone else.
The other part of it too, is a lot of readily available keyboards just look the same. There isn’t anything wrong with that, but if you want something a little bit more special you’ll have to pay for it. For example, one of the TKL’s that really caught my eye was the Saevus Duality and that keyboard is around $600. Multiple parts, different weights, and the samples probably cost a lot. To me it’s basically a customizable piece of ‘art’ and I can those little things that I enjoy that make it my ‘own’ such as switches, stabs, and keycaps.