Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
Pricing graph - https://www.massdrop.com/buy/pulse-sa-keycap-set/talk/2036231?utm_source=linkshare&referer=AV5F4D
https://www.massdrop.com/buy/pulse-sa-keycap-set/talk/2046690
The problem I see with this, that's pretty close to the $10 drop for 1000 orders. Looking back at GMK Laser, we had Gaijin get updated with the last update to have 921/1000 for the $14 price drop. If you do the math on it, Massdrop could have easily bought those last 79 sets to get the $46 price @ $3,634. Then, that means everybody else should get the $46 price but Massdrop keeps the charge at $60. So $14 in their pocket on 921 sets means $12,894 back, subtract out the $3,634 from the 79 set purchase and Massdrop makes a heft $9,260 profit by buying up to the price drop and not giving that back to the customers and then have 79 Gaijin sets to sell for a price bump on a keycap recap so they're basically making $13,000+ on that.
If my assumption above on Pulse Text Mods is the same and we're roughly at 900 kits to the 1000 price drop of $10. That's Massdrop paying $5,000 to buy 100 kits @ $50. Pocket the $10 price drop from 900 kits and that's $9,000. Take out the $5,000 to get the 1000 kits price drop and that's another $4,000 profit AND they still get to sell those spares on a recap so really you get back the $5,000 investment if you sell them all and stick with about $9,000 profit.
I know this because I've done bulk buy orders where you need to factor in things like initial up front costs (in the case of these sets the tooling to make the keycaps) and then the production price is the same regardless of how many items you make. Sometimes, they will give discounts on item price based on quantity of order as well.
Either way, we just get this lazy updated spreadsheet when behind the scenes Massdrop knows the true numbers. Although, with some good math, you might be able to figure out the actual tooling costs, or at least a rough idea of the true "per set" cost.
I mentioned that in [1].