Whitefox is nice ... But that price ? Why does 60% costs 60% more than a full size keyboard ? Their's something wrong with mechanical keyboard pricing (just look at the ergodox price).
I got a Model F and an M0110, shipped from Texas to France (6 lbs worth of keyboards) for less than that. And quality wise, modern mechs are far behind those 2.
I won't argue that there aren't some market distortions (for example, did you know that PBT keys actually cost less to make at the factory than ABS keys?), but I'd say none of the pricing for these bespoke boards are "overpriced" based on their costs/BOM, or even expensive on an absolute basis.
Firstly, the
Model F was sold/manufactured by IBM/Lexmark from 1981-1994. Approximate standalone pricing at the time
was about $400 not inflation adjusted. Using basic CPI calculation that'd be somewhere between $650-$1060 in 2016 dollars. These were sold w/ every single IBM PC for years, so of course number in the millions, which is why you can sometimes find them for cheap these days (but usually
not much cheaper). For those interested,
modern F77/F62s "Kishsavers" are being manufactured/pre-orderable right now for about $350 and seems like a good deal if you're into that sort of thing.
As almost all these new enthusiast keyboards are being done open source (or at least fairly transparently), you can pretty easily find BOM/pricing on projects and see for yourself whether prices are reasonable.
For example, here's the
GH60 group buy from 2013 (note: this took over 2 years and a helluvalot of blood, sweat and tears to finally get delivered). PCBs and switches totaled around $100 or so sans case and keycaps. A group buy on a decent set of PBT keycaps will run you anywhere from $30 to $100+ for Dolch's/Granites. (these days Signature keeps
a fair amount of stuff in stock for about the same price). CNC'd aluminum cases never cost less than $100. I'm not familiar enough w/ CNC milling to really say if you could get one made cheaper if you really tried, but my company's contracted lots of one-off fabrication and we pay a
lot more for our parts.
And this is just for bare bog standard parts and assuming no one gets paid for any of their design/organizing work. And as soon as you need to do any custom work like injection molding you're talking about $10K's up-front, as well as travel expenses for coordinating w/ the factory. These costs are easy to amortize over hundreds of thousands or millions of units, but at 300 or 1000 keyboards? That's a pretty substantial per-unit cost.
When you consider you'll pay close to the same amount ($200-300) for niche "mass produced" keyboards like the Leopolds, Varmilos, HHKBs, hobby keyboard pricing starts to seem pretty reasonable. Of course you can buy a Pok3r for $135 (heck the CM Storm QFRs or Anne Pros for <$60), but the pricing largely reflects their corresponding cost structures rather than necessarily anything more nefarious.
