It’s basically a big chicken-and-egg problem. MOQs / decent price points on Alps keycaps are hard to hit, because not too many people are looking for aftermarket Alps keycaps, because most of the people who care about colorful aftermarket keycaps use MX boards, because that’s where the colorful keycaps are. Very hard to outcompete that without more ecosystem of Alps parts.
Additionally, there’s a problem where most people with 20-year-old Alps keyboards or new Matias keyboards can’t use SP’s stabilized keycaps. There are only a few boards that can totally use the caps from this particular group buy, and they’re in relatively short supply, which makes it hard for very many people to commit here. Even most of the old keyboards (from Chicony, Monterey, Datacomp, etc.) that would accept the stabilized caps here have bigass enter keys, so still can’t be 100% swapped.
So the main market here for complete cap replacement is either people with MassDrop’s infinity board, or else people who are building new boards from scratch and cutting their own plates. This is a tiny group.
Alternately, there might people with other Alps boards who want to replace the unstabilized keycaps with these, and find stabilized keycaps somewhere else... Which means they need to match the color scheme with their existing keycaps. Some folks are probably happy with black-on-beige/gray modifiers and blue-on-black alphas, but that’s a fairly niche preference, I’m guessing.
Matias’s upcoming 60% board, as well as all MassDrop-made boards after another couple months (like Ergodoxes and Infinity keyboards etc.) should have stabilizers compatible with both types of Alps keycaps, so that should help somewhat to increase the number of people who could use SP Alps caps.
Beyond that, I think it would probably work better to start with buys for color schemes with a bit broader appeal.
Poll