TL;DR: Last 48 hours to order anything if you’re a US customer—before tariffs come in, and before we pause all US sales. No matter where you are, take
10% off everything, or $50 off the Model 100.
Hello from sunny California,
We’re writing one final time to let you know that we’re pausing accepting US orders on April 23, about 48 hours from now.
Wait, why are you pausing US shipments?
Other than a few months working with an expensive US warehouse that had a habit of breaking or losing our keyboards, we've always fulfilled our keyboards out of Hong Kong. It’s close to our factory, reasonably priced, and can easily handle fulfilling orders going all around the world.
Historically, U.S. residents could place small international orders, up to $800 value, without having to pay import duty. This was called the "de minimis" rule.
Now, the de minimis rule is going away, so everything made in China and shipped to the US will be taxed. For our products, this tax currently ranges from 20% to 145%.
The exact mechanics of how this is going to work are fuzzy. While we expect that people will stop importing as much due to tariffs making it unaffordable, it still implies a lot of additional work for customs. It's not clear to us—or the carriers—that customs is staffed up to handle this increased volume, and we’re expecting that any packages arriving to the USA once the de minimis rule goes away may have long processing delays.
Anticipating long delays,
DHL has already stopped taking any packages that require formal customs clearances into the USA.
HK Post, another carrier we use, will suspend service to the USA entirely beginning in a few days. We expect other carriers to change their fee schedule and availability too.
For packages that ship today—or by our cut-off, April 23—we can ship them to arrive in the USA before the tariffs kick in on May 2.
After that date, packages will be taxed—but we don’t yet have clarity on which carriers will be operating, what documentation we’ll need (possibly including customers’ social security numbers), what clearance fees or additional customs bond fees will be assessed, or most critically, what the actual delivery timeline will be.
Given these uncertainties, it's safest for us to just stop taking US orders altogether for a bit. Once we have confidence that we have a shipping partner that can reliably deliver to the USA under these new regulations, we’ll turn US orders back on. We hope that will be in early May.
If you are considering a
Keyboardio product and are based in the USA, it’s going to be more expensive and more annoying to get, starting a few days from now.
We’d suggest ordering now. For non-USA countries, we will continue to ship without interruption.
