Profit is a Dirty Word?

There is a peculiar thing that happens the moment you mention money in a keyboard Discord. Grown adults, who will happily spend £400 on a case, £180 on keycaps, £90 on switches and another £60 on a coiled cable that does the same job as a £4 one from Amazon, will suddenly clutch their pearls if a vendor so much as breathes the words margin, profit or even hints at making money.

Profit, in this hobby, is treated like a swear word muttered at a christening. Something dirty that babies shouldn't be allowed to hear. Something impolite that shouldn't be uttered in a place of worship. Something that must surely mean somebody, somewhere, is being fleeced and left bereft of their hard earned cash. Criminal almost...

And I get it.

Sort of. The custom mechanical keyboard scene grew out of forums and Discord servers and people making things for the love of it, not because they wanted to buy a second yacht or a Mclaren. It's a hobby with a proud lineage of designers doing it for the community, at cost, on evenings and weekends, funded by their day jobs and the goodwill of strangers on the internet. That's genuinely beautiful. It's also, quietly, the reason the whole thing is now teetering on the edge of a cliff wearing roller skates.

 

Grass Roots Keyboarding

Every industry has an origin story that sets its pricing DNA for the next fifty years. Cars had Henry Ford deciding the working man should be able to afford one. Watches had the Swiss deciding that timekeeping should cost the same as a small house. Keyboards, bless them, had a bunch of designers on Geekhack in the early 2010s deciding that they'd rather run at basically breakeven than be seen as "in it for the money".

That was fine, for a bit. When the whole hobby was a person and a Photoshop mockup, you didn't need proper margins because you didn't have proper overheads. There was no warehouse. There was no staff. There was no VAT return, no import agent on speed dial, no courier holding your parcel hostage in a depot in Frankfurt because someone ticked the wrong box on a CN22. The designer took a small percent, the vendor (if there even was one) took a small percent, the factory took a slightly larger clip, and everyone went home happy.

Then the hobby grew. And grew. And grew. And nobody, at any point, thought to sit down and say "hang on, maybe we should charge what this actually costs to do properly".

 

Keyboard Math (it's because no one has a numpad)

Here's the bit that makes my accountant weep into their spreadsheet every week. Ask any half-competent retail business what gross margin they need to survive and they'll tell you 50%. That's not greed. That's the number you need to cover rent, staff, insurance, packaging, marketing, returns, breakages, the guy who comes to service the fire extinguishers, the software subscriptions that quietly rise every January, and the small mercy of paying yourself something resembling a wage at the end of the month.

Custom keyboard retail runs, on a good day, at 10 to 15% gross margin. On a bad day, and there are a fucking lot of bad days, it runs at less. Sometimes considerably less, once you factor in the extra costs that magically appear halfway through a project because the factory has decided the mould needs re-tooling, the designer demands more than the original total profits or the price of materials goes up.

Do the maths on what a proper margin would look like and it gets uncomfortable very fast. That £140 GMK set you grumbled about? At a normal retail margin, you'd be looking at £200 plus. That £350 board? Comfortably £500. The coiled cable? Actually, the coiled cable would still be too expensive, even though they look amazing, but that's a separate rant.

The reason none of that happens is because the community would set fire to the vendor's Instagram within an hour. Charge what it actually costs to sell this stuff properly and you're "gouging". Charge what it currently costs and you're operating a business that could be flattened by one bad shipment, one dodgy exchange rate, or one designer going quiet on Discord for three months.

We are, all of us, running on fumes and goodwill. And fumes, it turns out, are not a sustainable long-term strategy.

 

The Great "I'll Wait For Stock" Delusion

Which brings me to my absolute favourite phenomenon of the modern hobby: the wait-and-see brigade. These are the people who see a group buy open, decide the £100 keycap set is a bit steep, and confidently declare in the comments that they'll "just wait until it's in stock". As though in-stock keycaps are a naturally occurring resource that bubbles up out of the ground in Guangdong or Germany, ready to be harvested at the vendor's leisure.

I have news for these people, and it is not good news.

Group buys exist because designers and vendors cannot afford to speculatively front the cost of a keycap set that might not sell. The minimum order quantity from GMK, or Signature Plastics, or any of the serious factories, is enormous. Hundreds of sets, sometimes thousands depending on how you want to price it. If the group buy doesn't hit MOQ, the project doesn't run. It doesn't get made. There is no "waiting for stock" because there is no stock. There will never be any stock. Nothing to wait for.

Congratulations, you have successfully waited a keyset out of existence.

And here's the darker version of the same problem. Even when a group buy does hit MOQ, the extras run (the sets vendors order on top for post-GB stock) is a genuine gamble. Order too few and you disappoint people. Order too many and you have a shelf full of what my last blog affectionately called "the keyboard equivalent of the non-running cars on my driveway". Sitting there. Not moving. Quietly consuming cash and self-esteem.

Ask me how I know...

The wait-and-see crowd have created a self-fulfilling prophecy where the safest thing for vendors to do is order fewer extras, which means less in-stock availability, which means more people convinced they should "just wait", which means smaller group buys, which means... yes, you're ahead of me. It's a doom loop with an old school cherry escape keycap on top.

 

The Market Is Shrinking

Here is the uncomfortable truth I've been dancing around for eighteen months and am now going to just come out and say. The custom keyboard market is getting smaller. Not catastrophically. Not overnight. But steadily, measurably, month on month, the overall pie is shrinking while the number of forks at the table is going up.

There are more group buys running right now than there should be. We say no to more projects a month than we say yes to. More designers. More vendors. More Discord servers dedicated to more increasingly niche subgenres of a hobby that, if we're honest, was already fairly niche to begin with. And yet total sales, across the sector, are drifting downwards. Not falling off a cliff, but the trend line is not our friend.

The reason more projects have started to fail is not because they're bad projects. Some of them are fantastic. SA Ocean Spirit is a genuinely gorgeous set, properly considered, executed with care, exactly the kind of thing this hobby exists to produce. GMK MTNU Welles is a lovely profile in a lovely colourway with a lovely story behind it. Neither of these are the kind of half-hearted gradient on Cherry profile projects that sometimes deserve to struggle.

They are struggling because there simply aren't enough enthusiasts left to comfortably fill every group buy that gets announced. The audience is finite. The projects are not. Basic arithmetic wins in the end, and basic arithmetic is telling us that some of these projects, brilliant as they are, will scrape MOQ, or miss it, or barely limp across the line in a way that leaves the designer wondering if it was worth the eighteen months of work.

That's not a market correction really, that's a market being asked to feed more mouths than there is food for.

 

The Two Doors Conjecture

So here we are. Small vendor. Thin margins. Shrinking market. More competition than ever. And in front of me, two doors marked Growth, both of them slightly terrifying.

Door One: eat the little guys. The only way to grow revenue in a shrinking market is to take market share from someone else. Which, in a scene of small independent vendors mostly run by decent human beings who are also your mates, feels genuinely awful. I know many vendors who demonstrably don't agree with me here, but I don't want to grow Prototypist by strangling someone else's dream. That's not what this hobby is for, at least in my opinion. That's not what any of us signed up for. But the maths, that beautiful, unforgiving maths, doesn't care about my feelings.

Door Two: go corporate. Stop being a boutique. Start being a brand. Chase the Glorious and NuPhy crowd. Mass-market, mass-produce, mass-advertise. Better margins, bigger volumes, actual proper marketing budgets, ads on YouTube, sponsored streamers, the lot. Trade the soul of the thing for the sustainability of the thing.

I don't want to walk through either door. But standing still in the corridor isn't a strategy either, because the corridor is on fire, shrinking like a trash compactor and probably has something hiding in the scum at the bottom.

The genuinely bleak version of the future is one where the entire premium end of the hobby quietly evaporates over the next five years. Where the designers move on because they can't afford another eighteen-month project that barely breaks even. Where the vendors close because 12% margin doesn't cover 2027's shipping rates. Where the enthusiasts drift off into other hobbies because there's nothing new coming out worth getting excited about. And where the only custom keyboards left are ones made by companies with marketing departments larger than my entire business, selling to people who think RGB is a personality trait.

I would very much like that not to be the future.

 

What We Actually Need

So here's my slightly ranty plea, and it's aimed at everyone in this hobby who has ever posted "meh, I'll wait for stock" in a group buy thread.

Join the group buys. If you love a product, back it. Don't wait. Don't hedge. Don't assume someone else will make the numbers work so you can pick up a set in six months' time from a vendor's clearance page. That vendor might not exist in six months. That set might never be made. The whole system runs on people committing when it matters, not on people watching from the sidelines to see if the project makes it.

Understand what things actually cost. When a vendor charges £140 for a keyset, they are not laughing all the way to a private island or Cartier watches. They are, on a good month, laughing all the way to the shipping suppliers to negotiate slightly less awful rates for the EU lane as a new tax is being introduced.... Profit is not a dirty word. Profit is what keeps the shop open next year so it can bring you the next thing you'll love.

Support the small vendors. All of them, not just PT. This scene has, historically, been built by a network of small operators who genuinely care about the products they sell and the community they serve. If that network collapses into two or three big corporates flogging plasticky gasket-mount clones with LED strips, we will have lost something that took fifteen years to build and cannot be rebuilt in another fifteen.

Say something nice occasionally. And I'm only half joking here. A designer who's spent two years on a project doesn't need another Reddit thread arguing about whether their kitting isnt supporting a 30% exploded layout with a 19u space bar. They need someone to say "this is beautiful, thank you for making it". The hobby runs on love as much as it runs on money, and both reserves are looking a bit thin.

I'm not going anywhere. Prototypist isn't going anywhere. The J-01 and J-03 Final Editions are coming, the group buys we've committed to are being honoured, my coffee is being roasted, and the little boxes of happiness are being shipped as fast as our team can pack them and the couriers can lose them. But I'd quite like to still be doing this in 2031, and for that to happen, this hobby needs to have a serious, adult conversation with itself about what it costs to keep the lights on.

Profit isn't a dirty word. It's the word that pays for the next great keyset, the next brilliant board, the next weird little layout that shouldn't exist but somehow does. It's the word that keeps the community-run corner of this hobby community-run.

Back the group buys. Order that stupid meme. Support the small vendors. And for the love of all that this hobby stands for, stop waiting for stock that was maybe never going to exist in the first place? 

Tell me I'm wrong, comments are open...

Jae