I received the pricing of the kits last week, went over the spreadsheet and played out different scenarios in my head for the average consumer. I just wasn't happy with the total that too many people would end up having to pay. The Git Base Kit is solid with a very good entry price at 250 units, and so is the Assembly Kit at 100 units already. However if your preference was on Regular/Monochrome Modifiers, you'd easily break 200$ at initial price points already, and that's a price that should be reserved for aftermarket if anything. And people that wanted Regular Mods with Hagoromo Alphas on a TKL had a even worse time since they had to buy the Base Kit just for the Nav keys. Obviously I knew this was coming, it was easy to predict these pricing with old GB's for reference, it was just different now seeing the actual prices in the spreadsheet and tallying them up in my head and I wasn't happy. Therefor, I am making the following changes:
- I've removed the Regular and Monochrome Modifier Addon kits, instead they are now simply full Base Kits. Git Base Kit and Regular Base Kit will have an MOQ of 250 each, the Monochrome Base Kit I will start at an MOQ of 150 to play it safe (going by April Fools Data, which showed a split of 48%/34%/18% between the three Modifiers, Git and Regular would need to hit a combined units of 1400 for Monochrome to hit 250. Not impossible, but too high to bet on).
- In the Monochrome Base Kit, I've changed the Code legend to Super to be more in line with the vintage aesthetic that this kit is trying to achieve. I probably won't update the keyboard renders in this IC, I will however try to bring this change to the renders that will be on the store page.
- I've moved the ISO-Return/Shift keys and pipe keys to the respective Base Kits, the International Kit was too pricey, you don't even wanna know how much. MOQ will start at 50 with the new kit. Base Kits now support ISO-US/ISO-Physical. International Kit now has just the 1.5u, 1.25u and 1u Alt Graph keys as modifiers.
- Added R3 and R4 1u Pipe Keys to Hagoromo Alphas to allow physical Hagoromo ISO with the Base Kits
- Assembly Kit has been renamed to Assembly Base Kit to signify that it's a starting point in dressing your keyboard before moving onto other kits.
I am aware that there was a small group of people that benefited from the old setup, for example Regular/Monochrome Modifiers + Hagoromo Alphas covered HHKB/60%, or Base + Modifiers + Hagoromo would cover a TKL/Fullsize and a 65%, however I believe more people will benefit from this change. There's more people that either need more keys beyond just the Modifiers or simply just want to outfit one board with Regular/Monochrome. Every change will always favor one group while putting another at a disadvantage, for this scenario, I feel the people that benefit vastly outweigh those that don't.
The thought of having the Git Base Kit hitting 1000 units for a juicy 10$+ price drop over 500 units price was nice, but it's nicer to have more people save 60-70$ by not having to buy Modifier addon kits on top of the Base Kit.
MOQ's of 250/250/150 for the three Base Kits don't worry me at all, they'll get there easily seeing that Round 1 already had 450 Gray and 270 White units sold, and that was in a time where Oblivion only existed in renders, even the SA version was yet to get to the group buy stage. Question is just if they'll also hit 500/500/250, many will probably say "duh ez pez it's oblivion dude", but I'd like to remind myself that Space Cadet "only" got to 590 units (of which 50 were Novelkeys extras so really just 540 individual sales), which was less than I expected after the rather successful IC phase. Not that I wasn't happy with that result, I just want to not expect too much and then not hit MOQ targets due to overconfidence.
The kits that changed most below, the entire lineup of all kits in first post.
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