(Please let us know in the comments section in the Combimouse Indiegogo campaign what you think the Combimouse should sell for.)

There is a large market for keyboards and mice, with companies like Apple and Logitech offering numerous different designs and combinations.  Logitech offers a wireless mice and keyboard bundle for $110 while Apple sells their Apple Wireless Keyboard for $69 and their Apple Magic mouse for $70 – a total of $139.

What then should the Combimouse sell for (including free shipping in the US)?

Based on early Indiegogo campaign feedback a sale price of $80 and $100 has been suggested as significantly more attractive.

Can we achieve this and still be profitable?

The Combimouse uses similar components as other keyboards and mice so material costs should be similar.

However, until we obtain accurate manufacturing quotes it is not possible to confirm this. To obtain accurate quotes we need to provide final design documents to our suppliers. To date we have only asked for very conservative estimates based on the current prototype.

The keyboards are the most expensive items.

We will be using the same keyboard technology that is used on the Acer Aspire S3 laptop keyboard as designed and supplied to Acer by Darfon.

Darfon will only respond to our enquiries when they can see that the project is a real commercial project.

For now an estimate for the keyboards was supplied by a keyboard company that doesn’t have experience in the specialist field of notebook keyboard technology – they provided the quote in order for us to at least have some conservative estimate, with the understanding that we would be approaching Darfon for actual quotes.  This company will be manufacturing the plastics and will do the assembly of Combimouse, and so will get the bulk of the business.

Initial estimates from our supplier were $18 for the left keyboard and $19 for the right keyboard. These are the estimates that we have used up until now.

However, we think that Darfon can supply us with much cheaper keyboards. We will be using the same keyboard technology that is used on the Acer Aspire S3 laptop keyboard (made by Darfon). It costs $13 to purchase one of these keyboards on eBay, including a profit element.

It is difficult to determine whether this is a realistic and representative value for the cost of keyboards. The keyboard we purchased appeared to be a genuine Acer/Darfon keyboard and worked well. We will assume for now that $13 is what we can expect to pay as it also ties in with the low price of complete keyboards available for sale.

As you can see we have estimated conservatively and this has hurt our Indiegogo campaign.

To better reflect customer price expectations and what we think is achievable, we have decided to introduce new Perks to our Indiegogo campaign.

As of the date of this blog post we have added more affordable Perks with a limited number available.