i really like all the interesting projects here but its always this god damned aluminium and that overrated 100$-adding brass weight with a fking 300$ (please dont ban me idk if the word is allowed here) price tag i hate it. please give me that abs but not on these terribly expensive gmk, or pc, or anything else. i think ill have to stick to prebuilt market for sub-100$ options, but maybe somewhere in the future we will see budget boards
You will not find what you want for that cost, it can't exist.
You pretty cannot build a custom board for less than $300, aluminum, plastic, anything because low volume manufacturing is labor intensive and costly.
It's just a reality of manufacturing.
The only way to make a keyboard cheap is injection molding, however injection molding is SUUUUUPER expensive to get started, it can easily cost you $20-30k for the molds (only the molds!) and you still haven't even made a single keyboard. If you only want 100 keyboards they would end up selling for $800. I'm not sure about you, but I'm not paying $800 for an ABS plastic keyboard.
While everyone acts like aluminum is best it really has some downsides but the truth is, it's pretty much the cheapest ways to make a low volume product. With milling you only pay for what you need, aluminum is cheap to mill hence it being popular. You can also mill polycarbonate. See where this is going?
There's only a few ways to make a keyboard case (you would want), all are either super expensive to start or super expensive per item. This is why there's a gap at the $250-$300 price point, it's a very difficult price point to hit in a keyboard due to the realities of manufacturing. And don't expect 3d printing to come to the rescue, metal 3d printing is NOT home friendly (probably won't be for a long time, if ever) and the only way 3d printing is cheap is if you own the machine.
All that said...
I'm not saying they are quite on the same level, but you can make one heck of a REALLY nice keyboard out of something mass produced. Preferably start with hot swap, this way you can easily replace and/or lube the switches and buy some better stabs, which also need lube and maybe band-aid mods. Do that, maybe some foam, some nice (not expensive) caps (I recommend cheap THICK PBT) and you'd be amazed at how good a "budget" keyboard can actually be.
Honestly, once you pass the $200-$300 mark, the cost to benefit ratio begins to drop extremely fast.
