Updated 2025-04-09 10:02 PDT to reflect new tariff rates and add a note about de minimis rates for HK Post.
Updated 2025-04-09 20:02 PDT to reflect the new 125% tariff rate.
Updated 2025-04-10 08:22 PDT to reflect clarification from the White House that it's 125% ON TOP of 20%.
To our US customers:
A few days ago, the Trump Administration announced that they will be ending the de minimis exemption for all shipments from Hong Kong and China on May 2. They also raised the minimum import tax on products made in China or Hong Kong to 54% 104% 125% 145% of the sale price.
While we design our keyboards in the US, like most consumer electronics companies, we manufacture our products in southern China. We ship worldwide from a warehouse in Hong Kong. These new rules will drastically increase how much it costs you to buy our products.
This is a long letter, even by our standards. There are three parts: why if you want a keyboard, you should buy it now; exploring why we manufacture where we do; and what you can do.
(1) If you've been considering buying anything we make, now is the time.
According to the new policy, you will owe a 54% 104% 125% 145% import tax on any package from Keyboardio that arrives after May 1 if it comes by any courier other than HK Post.
If it comes by HK Post, it will "only" be taxed at a rate of either 90% per package or $75 per item. HK Post can choose, once a month, which rate to use for all shipments they send to the US. Of course, that only matters if HK Post is still shipping to the US. In the past HK Post has suspended shipments to the US, rather than comply with new tariff rules.
Once the de minimis rule is gone, no sale we can offer will ever make the Model 100 or Atreus as inexpensive as it is today.
Starting in May, US customers will be charged $188 $363 $436 $506 in new taxes (tariffs) on a Model 100 + additional customs clearance fees. The new US taxes on the Atreus will be $80 $155 $186 $216 + additional customs clearance fees.
We're really proud of these keyboards—we designed them to be the most comfortable tools to help you be productive, and to help you enjoy the experience of typing. We think they're worth the investment. We don't think a 54% 104% 125% 145% tax is reasonable.
We hate those breathless marketing emails that say things like “LAST CHANCE!!!” and “ACT NOW. THESE DEALS WON’T LAST!” but that’s pretty much where we are now.
As absurd as it is to suggest that you “stock up” on Keyboardio keyboards…this is probably your last chance to buy our keyboards without paying these new punitive import taxes imposed by the Trump Administration.
As always, we're at: https://shop.keyboard.io
(2) Why don’t we make things in the USA already?
Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don't we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie?
Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.
Making keyboards is intrinsically a cross-border activity. (For us, some of that activity involves shipping American goods to China! We make a number of products that use American wood. Unfortunately, China has just announced they will now tax that lumber at 34% 125% in a retaliatory tariff.)
We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves.
Southern China, Guangdong and Shenzhen in particular, have developed an ecosystem of factories and suppliers within a small radius. Within about thirty miles, we work with a bunch of factories who are specialized in doing low volume production runs. Having so many companies close together saves a lot on transportation and freight. More importantly, it allows for local competition and sharing of knowledge—just like greater Los Angeles is the best place to make TV and movies even though other cities offer incentives, Guangdong is the best place to make consumer electronics.
The factories we use have to do a bunch of things for us:
- PCBA
- anodization
- low-volume (1-10k pcs) injection molding - up to 32 cavity
- plastic dying
- laser engraving
- custom cable manufacture
- wood CNC milling and installing pressfit inserts
- cardboard packaging fabrication in 1k or lower MOQ
- volume hand assembly and manual testing
And all of these specialties are close to each other, and close to a global logistics provider.
Producing keyboards at small scale means that much of the actual assembly has to be done by humans, not robots. The factories we work with pay these workers a good wage—more than twice the local minimum wage, with free lunch and dinner and insurance benefits. It’s a good enough wage that people travel from thousands of miles to take a job at these factories. But that’s a good wage in China. It’s not even minimum wage in the USA, much less the kind of wage you can comfortably support a family on.
If you want to get a sense of what it costs to hand assemble keyboards in the USA, take a look at Norbauer & Co’s Seneca keyboard. It’s gorgeous and beautifully made. It’s also priced at $3600.
Perhaps more importantly, the main factory we work with is focused on mechanical keyboards. In the building are hundreds of people-years of experience making keyboards and figuring out all the quirks of mechanical keyboard production.
And our factory is willing to work on small manufacturing runs. There are a couple of contract manufacturers in the USA who make keyboards, though overwhelmingly membrane keyboards rather than mechanical keyboards like ours (because membrane keyboards can have less manual, more automated production, it can make sense to make them in the USA for customers who have country of origin requirements). We wish we could tell you how much it would cost to make our flagship keyboard in say, the American Midwest, rather than Shenzhen. Unfortunately, we can’t—when we reached out to them, it wasn’t even worth their time to give us a quotation for our volume.
If we were to move production out of China, it would be to a country that has the ecosystem to support small contract manufacturing, probably in Asia. A number of peer companies have moved to Vietnam, which has lower labor costs than China. But the tariff changes were announced with less than a month's notice. It would take longer than that for us to just identify and vet new production partners. Even if we were to sign with a new set of factories today, production takes months: finalizing the design with the manufacturing capabilities of the factory in mind, creating and dialing in tooling, ordering and waiting for parts, figuring out processes at the factory, doing design validation tests, doing production validation tests, getting the product certified, actually making the product, doing quality control, reworking any defective pieces, and moving inventory to a fulfillment center. As of April 2025, we're currently in the final steps of making a run of keyboards at our factory in China. We've been in discussions about this particular design with the factory since October of 2023, 17 months ago. Even in a best case scenario with a trusted factory and finalized design, it would take us at least 4-5 months from signing until we could have inventory in hand. Even if a perfect factory were to sign with us today, we wouldn't be able to move our production before the tariffs hit.
Right now we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory currently in production. For that, of course, moving countries is even more of a non-starter.
(3) Call your representatives.
There’s bipartisan legislation proposed by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to impose additional congressional oversight on the President’s power to impose tariffs, but it’s not yet clear if there’s enough support for it to pass. Whether or not this specific bill passes, your elected representatives have the power to influence the administration directly.
The best thing you can do to help right now is to call your Senators and Congressperson and tell them to take action to reverse these new tariffs.
Let them know that the new tariffs are going to destroy small American businesses.
Let them know that the new tariffs are making products unaffordable to you.
You can find their contact information here:
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
We’ve had people replying to our email telling us to keep the politics out of our future marketing emails. Which in some ways is fair—as a company, we aren’t partisan, and we’ve never put political content in our emails before. But they don’t seem to understand that these unprecedented changes to trade rules means that they may not get any more marketing emails from us. If these tariffs stay in place, many small American businesses are going to suffer and may be wiped out: from board games to apparel to yes, computer keyboards.
<3 Jesse and Kaia