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macken
315
Apr 30, 2018
When are the final numbers coming in? Seems strange if the text mods didn't get up to 1000.
Joe405
353
Apr 30, 2018
mackenGot billed $59.90 and $34.90 for text mods and novelties respectively, so I guess they both didn't get the final price break. Maybe some last minute pull-outs
HerpDerpenberg
288
Apr 30, 2018
macken962 text and 973 novelties. We got hosed.
Now Massdrop is making bank buying those extra 30-40 sets to get a 1000 quantity price and charging us for the 200 drop price. Pocket difference, sell cap sets for profit in a recap.
MiTo
13953
MiTo
Apr 30, 2018
HerpDerpenbergThis is not what happens, it was discussed before and it’s unethical practice.
macken
315
Apr 30, 2018
HerpDerpenbergIt’s a good chunk of money too considering the text was 10 us cheaper at 1000 orders.
bubbachuck76
20
Apr 30, 2018
MiToI'm curious why it would be unethical. Seems like normal business practice. It's not like the customer is losing anything.
HerpDerpenberg
288
Apr 30, 2018
MiToMy concern is we keep seeing this pop over multiple drops. Having 25/50/75/100/200 and next 1000 is a pretty lame jump for discounts. I probably wouldn't be as concerned if it was for a $2 price drop like Novelties, but this was a $10 drop for text mods. Combine that with a lack of qty updates and some people might be on the fence for a significant $10 price drop on a set.
It's a no brainer where they could easily buy the 30-40 sets close to 1000 quantity to sell later in a recap. Those sets will sell, and they can mark them up $5-10 too I'd they want. They could even reopen the R3 drop for a day and I'd bet you would see those 30-40 orders get purchased by the community to hit the 1000 order.
If it's unethical to pocket the $9,700 savings ($10 drop in 970 orders) then I would say it's just as much bad practice to not buy the small number of sets (easily make their money back in a recap) and pass that savings to the consumer. We got hosed on GMK Laser Gaijin this same way missing out on a 1000 qty order and $14 price drop by less than 100 orders.
I'm just a post in discussions at this point and Massdrop doesn't have to listen to me, but you're the community's face and constantly say "At your service" so I wonder what is being done on your end to discuss with Massdrop when there are these insanely close drop points? Is Massdrop buying up to minimum quantities on sets to make sure all kits are produced? Why aren't they buying small number of sets to meet large discount quantities? What is their opinion on this, "to bad, so sad?"
HerpDerpenbergI was updating the drop counts until the last minute of the drop. In fact the final update I pretty much waited until the Ergo kit hit 100. In addition, after the payments from last night - Ergo dropped below 100 but I'm not going to go back and charge everyone more for it.
When there are kits that hit a lower price point and I wasn't able to catch the end of the drop - we've gone ahead and done refunds to the community.
The next bit you bring up - yes we actually do buy up MOQs for many kits that do not hit their drop points - that's why you still see so many GMK International Kits sitting around the various Keycap Re-cap drops. That's essentially liability on our end from years ago. But we want to get the community keycaps they wanted - even if it's not always the best move for us.
For your last point - why don't we go ahead and also buy up all the discounts to pass the savings to the community. That's a precarious slope for us to stand on. At what quantity should we consider buying up the extras? 10? 20? 50? I can tell you the cost difference between 200 - 1000 is pretty minuscule (in regards to SA sets) with $1 been the high end and very rare while most are around the $0.40 mark. We'll see how the day ends but know at the moment both Novelties and Text mods are sitting at around 930 sets paid for each.
MiTo
13953
MiTo
Apr 30, 2018
HerpDerpenbergI understand your concerns. The points you're raising seem valid at first glance, and I'm saying "at first glance" because right off the bat you're making some assumptions, straight out ignoring what the purpose of Massdrop is to begin with. Not to mention the economics and logistics behind every drop.
First of all, this "recap/sell later/extras" events somewhat blew out of proportion and they came with very negative downsides, community-wise, as they helped to shape misconceptions that some people, you included, seem to genuinely believe. The recap events are now something people kind of expect and think it's a norm - "Massdrop selling all of the kits, exactly like the group buy, but with instant shipping and no MOQ. Yay! It's a party!" While it's simply Massdrop's warehouse clearance - replacemet kits that were never used, random kits that are leftover somewhere, etc. It's a way Massdrop found to circulate stuff stuck in inventory and make the community happy because some kits are hard to come by, and not a multi-million practice that will sustain the company. If they step in and orders more kits, there's more risk, more inventory, more space consumed in warehouse, more fees, etc. It's not that simple.
I have done over 10 keycap set projects during my "career" as a community member and I have designed easily half a thousand kits, if not more, to this date. On every keycap set drop, several kits are offered and from the back end, the way Massdrop is designed, it's very complex for them to simply cancel somebody's order if a certain kit fails to reach MOQ. And some of the times, kits are very short of reaching MOQ, so Massdrop steps in and go ahead with manufacturing, so people don't lose their whole orders. How can a Brit use Godspeed's Base Kit without his UK kit? But what's the right amount? 5, 10, 20 kits? Where's the threshold? On top of that, a certain number of replacements are ordered so people can have marginal issues fixed, if their kits come with defects or else. A key gets sent for replacement, now the kit is broken and useless (missing a keycap, not possible to sell anymore).
At the end of the day, coordinating a drop isn't as easy middle-man work as it seems. There are costs, risks and logistics involved. You can be sure Massdrop has been improving regarding communication, methods for us to work, prices, delivery times and most importantly - quality of the keycaps. You can be sure you'll find the best designed and most affordable keysets here.
I don't have as much inside information as you think, but hopefully this helped solve a bit of your concerns. From my perspective they are doing the best they can, offering good prices and good products to the community.
At your service always!
MechWalker78
5
Apr 30, 2018
YanboWuThanks for clarifying this Yanbo, its good to see a well reasoned response to these type of questions rather than just silence.
Its unfortunate that the nature of these drops tends to see massive sales spikes right at the end due to people waiting until last minute and the proxy orders going through. Had the numbers for the text mods and novelties been at the 900+ levels for more than just a couple of hours before the end of the drop I suspect they may well have tipped over 1K by themselves but I don't really see how that can be avoided.
I understand the problems with setting general precedents on this given the typically small savings at higher drop points. I think the problem in this case is that a lot of people will do the math on this drop in isolation (particularly for the text mods) and come to the conclusion that if you were to just buy up those extra 70 sets quietly without passing any savings onto the community, Massdrop would end up making around $6000 of additional profit even if you just throw those extra sets straight in the trash when you get them. The only party that would seem to benefit from you not doing this would be SP.
Now these numbers don't take into account Massdrop's markup on these sets which will obviously bring that number down quite a bit...but it will look to a lot of folks here that you'd be crazy not to do that (as, well, why wouldn't you) even if you don't acknowledge it to the community. Personally I don't have any problem with that, your running a business after all, but I can understand why some others may not be quite as understanding.
Its when we start to talk about passing all those savings back to the community that things get complicated though. I really don't see why Massdrop should be expected to do that and take on the liability themselves but in cases like this it would be great if there was some way that both Massdrop and the community could benefit from the extra sets being bought when the numbers "appear" to be so clear cut and nobody would seem to be taking any additional liability or cost on board by doing it.
HerpDerpenberg
288
Apr 30, 2018
YanboWuHey, thanks for the updates. I know we were wondering if/when we would get them as the drop was ending early in the morning. I know I saw several updates towards midnight EST as well, so props for staying up late to update those. Was a nice surprise to see that, but I feel that the manual updates can really not help when we all of a sudden jump from 600 kits to 800+ where people think we were far off and now within reach of a price drop.
As far as the buy up discounts, I know what you mean where it's this edge case. You can't really be assumed to buy up all kits to hit the next price drop, as that would set a trend. Much like how you guys are basically assumed to buy all MOQ. But maybe doing something like not having a large jump from 100, 200 and then 1000 to make that transition a bit smoother?
Back to what I was saying, and you touched on it, when a kit price chagnes by $2, not a big deal, but when you're talking like $10 for Pulse Text Mods or $14 for GMK Laser Gaijin, it's that part where you were 85% there and felt so close. I'm not sure if the 100/200/1000 is an SP/GMK thing, but it's such a strange non-linear price breakpoint. I think that would solve a lot of the heartburn of "just missing" these larger price drops it they were spread out over smaller counts like 100/200/400/700/1000 or something like that? Just a thought maybe.
HerpDerpenberg
288
Apr 30, 2018
MiToIt's definitly a learning process. But I think the common part that keeps coming up are odd price drops per quantity (like 100, 200 and then 1000 and then 3000 as breakpoints) with inconsisten drops while some kits get $10-$15 drops and others only get a few dollars or so. Although it seems that alphas/mods get the bigger discounts, while novelties and specialty kits end up getting less, likely due to new tooling.
Then their system needing manual updates. I feel some people might be on the fence waiting for something to hit a price breakpoint. I know what's $10 when you're already spending $100 on keycaps, but that's still $10 I wouldn't have to spend on keycaps and could use towards other items.
I still want to thank you for putting the work into these drops. Just by looking at the Godspeed and Laser sample rejections, you're not just a yes man, which is good to get the final product that matches your original vision.
HerpDerpenberg"I'm not sure if the 100/200/1000 is an SP/GMK thing, but it's such a strange non-linear price breakpoint."
I tried to explain this before, but let me try again: nonlinear price break points make perfect sense. This is because there are two main types of expenses in making and selling keycap kits: fixed cost & variable cost.
Fixed cost is constant regardless of how many kits are made. Since fixed cost is distributed evenly to each kit made, the fixed-cost portion of each kit's price decreases non-linearly as the number of kits made increases.
In contrast, the variable cost is directly related to the output volume, so it remains constant per kit no matter how many are made.
Thus the total cost per kit ($fixed/qty + $variable) approaches - but never quite equals - the variable cost alone as the quantity of kits made increases. This approach is exponential (not linear), thus the reason price break points are also nonlinear. This graph illustrates what I just wrote:
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I totally made up all that data, including the three yellow break points, but the math is true no matter what the numbers are. Of course you could add more break points, but for each additional break point the price drops become smaller and the complexity (and cost) of maintaining the books increases - adding to the fixed cost.
It also makes perfect sense for break point conditions to be different for different kits: the fixed and variable costs are case-by-case.
cijanzen
600
May 1, 2018
dvorcolI just have to say I love how you responded with a graph. Of course there is a graph from you! But also it makes sense. I think we're also just seeing some growing pains for this community and Massdrop.
This is in response to @HerpDerpenberg and others: Yes, an automated system, would make most of these points moot but it takes a lot of work to automate these processes. It's not very easy to code these types of things all the time despite how simple the idea may seem.
Personally, I'm just happy that we received any updates at all on a Sunday night for that matter so thanks to whomever was updating this drop on a weekend evening!
azcs
173
May 1, 2018
YanboWuBro, you guys went 2 days without an update, twice. We probably watched it more then you did, and you work here.
dvorcolWhat I meant by "non-linear" is the X-axis on your graph. Taking the Pulse Text Mods as an example, $8 drop to go from 100 to 200. Then $10 drop to go from 200 up to 1000. A non-linear quantity increase for, more or less, a linear price drop in the Y-axis. I understand there are diminishing returns where you need exponential more kits to see that constant discount decrease and eventually you'll never see that discount stay linear. Just making up numbers, if each set has a materials/labor cost of $40, it will never go below $40, even if you get infinity sets.
But my point is... Why not go every 200 up to 1000? 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000. Sure, the price drop might not go down in some huge numbers or look as sexy as we hit those higher breakpoints, but you'd have something like $60, $56, $53, $51, $50 price change that would still fit within the trend line. So then with the SA Pulse order of 962 text mods, we're talking about a $1 price change to go from 800 to 100, instead of $10 to go from 200 to 1000. Everyone doesn't get all bummed out that we can see the finish line only to run out of steam without crossing it.
@cijanzen I'm happy they were updating it too, this was actually one of the first drops I've witnessed getting multiple quantity updates as it approached the end. It's just that when it gets close to the end, that's when a lot of people might be in or out based on having a $10 price change or not. IMO, still silly to be in/out on $10 for a $100+ keycap order, and one that you can probably flip for at the very least the same cost you put into it on the mech market. But hey, some people might not have a crazy disposable income and that $10 is what's their hard decision.
HerpDerpenberg@HerpDerpenberg As @MiTo and @YanboWu have tried to explain, they only give you the cheaper price if you hit the price break. And not only that, the price difference between the 750 to 1000 is usually around less than 50 cents per kit, and almost never more than $1 less. But those first few price points are painfully expensive if you don't get enough! An ErgoDox kit that costs $34 @100 can cost $109 if you only have 10 kits made, not including any shipping or processing.
To prove this to you, I have attached a real life quote below from SP that I received back in Dec 2016 for an SA keycap set that I planned but had never fully conceived. If you are curious what keys were included in this set, it's on a GH page I haven't updated in forever (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=85790.0). Please keep in mind this quote does NOT take into account any shipping costs, labor, wages, or the processing and storage fees incurred on the one who processes these orders (in this case, MassDrop).
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(IIRC you can have SP give quotes beyond 1000 MOQ and further, but this was just the typical sample set I was given.)
This also doesn't take into account the fact that there are almost always some problems with manufacturing. Sometimes a couple keys get damaged when being produced (damn spacebars!) or scratched in shipping, sometimes all of them do. Customs can do stupid stuff with your packaging for example. For reasons like this they try to predict any possible problems and buy extras to try and replace keys/sets for people who have problems. But it is physically impossible to predict all of the problems you might have with any particular kit/set. So it's a complete guessing game that MD has been working hard to try and nail down. They do pretty well for the most part, but nobody is perfect.
As far as them making a huge profit for buying a few extra sets though? That's just absurd. They may be able to save a little bit of money in some reasonable situations where it would be almost absurd not to; but it almost always gets passed to us at the reduced price when they do. And that kind of action can save us a lot more in the long run. People really seem to like to hate on MD but these guys actually tend to do a pretty good job.
TL:DR; No, MassDrop is not making bank by buying 30-40 kits to hit a 1000 MoQ price. Nor are they pocketing a ton of money from kits with low MoQ's. They have to deal with a lot of logistics issues that you the consumer almost never have to deal with. MD takes their small cut, passes some of the proceeds to the artist(s) who created the set, and then they pass on all of the products and savings to us. Without them advertising these sets there are a lot less people buying, which in turn costs us a lot more.
If you wanted to personally have one a custom set made it could cost you thousands of dollars. Even if you bought 10 for the minimum MOQ price break, it could cost an upwards of $2500 just for 10 full TKL kits, not including novelties or other custom configurations. But there we have far more strength in numbers, which is why we have MassDrop. :)
io2redI guess I had some lost in translation on my explanation, because everyone keeps talking over my major concern. I get it, 999 kits sold means you don't get 1000 pricing. I get that the reduction in price (to stay the same) requires many more kits than the prior drop price. We can't just expect Massdrop to buy up quantities to hit the next price breakpoint, as that can be a very costly investment for them just to pass on a savings to us and it is no guarantee that they will actually be able to sell all of those extra quantities. So I'm not expecting them to purchase up to the next breakpoint. They already crossed the bridge of buying up MOQ though, so I think they, more or less, shot themselves in that foot.
Your example of "The price difference between 750 to 1000 is usually around less than 50 cents per kit, and almost never more than $1 less". Then looking at your chart, yeah that's true for the direct SP pricing. But you it's not a direct compare SA Pulse R3 Text Mods 750 to 1000 as the breakpoint was 200 to 1000. That gave a $60 to $50 price drop for 200 to 1000, or a 16.6% price drop. Go to your chart for modifiers, $36.54 to $30.81 is 15.7% price drop from 200 to 1000, so that matches in line. But why did Massdrop go 200 to 1000? There were 250, 500 and 750 breakpoints in between there. That would give more frequent price drops. Doesn't match with your "but it almost always gets passed to us at the reduced price when they do" point either.
In all cases, it benefits Massdrop more to do a 200 to 1000 and ideally they want 999 kits sold, so they don't hit that price drop and cut into profits. Go back to your SP chart, yes I know there are still factors for errors, shipping/handling, profit, but that's simply just + X% to each kit. 999 kits sold at 200 quantity price ($36.54) is $36,503.46. The actual price from SP is 999 kits at 750 quantity price ($31.51) or $31,478. So there is a profit of $5,024.97 by not going to 1000 kits price. Now, is that really a profit? Probably not because it can help offset the cost of MOQ buyout to get all kits made. But you would be downright bad a business sense to not buy 1 extra kit to make 1000 quantity pricing as well and save another ~$670.
One of my questions to Mito was who sets the quantity breakpoints, and from your SP chart, it seems Massdrop does. I already addressed my concern to YanboWu. I just think it would be nice to see quantity price drops in line with the SP pricing chart you showed at. That way we're not barely missing significant price drops in kit quantities.
io2redLinear kit quantity axis:
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Log base 10 kit quantity axis:
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Data from io2red's quote from SP - https://massdrop-s3.imgix.net/img_comment/XUPLTXu6Tvq8mT1GDFQM_chrome_2018-05-01_11-07-30.png?auto=format&fm=jpg&fit=min&h=425&dpr=1
dvorcolI love me some log scales. Deal plenty with them doing PSD vibration profiles. But those 40s kits at early/low quantities. Damn...
HerpDerpenbergThen let's go whole log!
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ProtonDecay
11
May 2, 2018
dvorcolThat's a great chart! How close are the sets on a price-per-key basis?
ProtonDecayI just learned about this set when @io2red shared SP's quotation in the post above. But you could look at the GeekHack post to study how keycap count (and width, I'd bet) impacts kit cost. Any unique (new) legends and/or keycap sizes would have a big impact too (new tooling).
EDIT: GeekHack link - https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86123.0
dvorcol@HerpDerpenberg I can completely understand your frustration there, and you are right to some degree. I believe MD is the one who has the say in the price breakpoints, but I don't think the price differences are as vast as you are thinking. In the case of a 200 price point to a 1000 price point it can be a decent amount, but it might not have been as big of a price decrease as you are thinking. I don't know what the costs were for this run though, so this is all purely speculation and I cannot confirm for you. I would agree there are certain situations where they could possibly make an extra 1 to 2 thousand, but this still goes back to a point I was trying to make with my last post.
" Without them advertising these sets there are a lot less people buying, which in turn costs us a lot more."
And with this I mean that these keycap sets wouldn't receive nearly as much publicity doing it on their own as they would by running on MD. Even the famous KB artists like MiTo wouldn't do as well if he was only advertising on Reddit and GH. There are a lot of different people who visit MD each day, and they aren't all looking for mechanical keyboards. So they really did most of the work for that money IMO. Sure we are all going in on the purchase together, and we should receive savings too, no doubt. But they are the one who fostered this community for several years and all of us have made it what it currently is. So I believe it's in our best interest for MD to at least make some money so they can keep running these buys. Not saying it's okay for MD to price gouge us on everything, but they need to at least be able to stay in the green and pay the bills. ;)
@dvorcol Love the charts! It is pretty interesting to see all of the data plotted like that. You can really get an idea for how important each price point is. The cost to produce each kit is clearly nonlinear. Some kits drop in price quickly while some of the others don't drop nearly as fast. I could imagine the cost of the mould can vary drastically depending on how many keys are needed in that kit. There is probably an ideal cost to key space ratio that could be used to reduce the price of these kits. But one of the lessons I learned was that GMK is doing it right IMO, and the more kits you have the more expensive the entire run could potentially be.
@ProtonDecay Check out the GeekHack thread that dvorcol just posted to see what keys were planned to be included in each kit. It is possible I may have changed one or two of the kits after the quote, but I am almost positive the quote was for the exact same kits you can see on that thread. (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86123.0)
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