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Good Time to Buy Keycaps – Yuzu Redesigns Its Website

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link to Yuzu Keycaps. We may earn a commission if you purchase through it, at no additional cost to you.

Yuzu Keycaps are a great service, with custom keycaps at prices comparable to non-generic keycaps you can source from manufacturers. I wrote about this back in April. Recently, they sent us a note advising some news.

They redesigned their website
They added some pre-configured sets for people who don’t want to design their own.
They added the KLP Lame profile, which is popular for some split boards like the Corne, in both MX and Choc V1.

In honor of this, they offered me a coupon code to give out.

Yuzu Keycaps discount: Use code PLUSONE for 10% off your order through October 24, 2026.

I wanted to take a moment to revisit Yuzu and their new website and features.

Keycap Sets

This is a great idea for Yuzu. They are sets on demand, with a preset combination of keys. I’m a bit disappointed they don’t have a 40s kit option, only a Base, Mini, and Numpad option. They have 43 presets when I looked. It isn’t easy to design a keycap set. I’ve designed custom ones for my various boards through my few Yuzu orders of the past and it is a challenge to put it together.

Custom Keycaps

For the first time, the unit cost for keycaps is front and center. With an estimate of the cost for common board sizes.

$0.75/u for 140u+
$0.80/u for 80u+
$0.90/u for 60u
$1.00/u for 45u
$1.10/u for < 45u

There is a surcharge for PBS profile of $0.10/u. So, that means if you order a 121 key full size keyboard set, that is $96.80, or $108.90 for a PBS. Most sets have key support for a variety of different keyboards, but if you know the size, you can only get the keycaps you want.

I usually, to future proof, get a few alternates so I can move my keysets between boards, but I try to pick very close design elements.

Profile Support

I don’t use the type of keyboard requiring KLP Lamé profile keys regularly, and don’t own anything that would benefit from it, but for the community that does, this adds them to a growing set of people who can make custom items for their custom keyboards.

I’m not sure how Yuzu makes its profile decisions or what the business considerations are. I’d love to see them support KAT, for example, which is a sculpted version of KAM(which they do support), or a taller profile. Even without that, there are more than enough good profiles to make anything you can imagine.

Keycap Playground

The revised custom keycap editor features include a profile comparison, a color picker that supports pantone colors, 3d views, an option to order a color sampler, and more.

I had played extensively with the old one, and there are a lot of improvements. But sometimes, I’ve found the editor freezing on me, forcing me to save and reload. It may be something I am doing that I don’t understand, and I haven’t asked them yet, but any new software runs the risk of bugs.

Overall

In the end, I have learned a lot of strategies for my own designs. I use a lot of keyboards that require custom kitting. They don’t work with keys from standard keysets. But they also use less keys. So, as a result, I’m designing sets for 50 or less keys on average, and it works perfectly for this.

My strategies for that are to design sets with different alphas, but an identical set of interchangeable modifiers. Alphas are the letters and numbers, modifiers being keys like Enter, Shift, Tab, etc. This allows me to have some different options and extra keys to switch the sets to different boards in the future. But not any different board, a limited set of them.

While I have had some issues with my Yuzu orders, some of them were of my own making, others were alignment issues I could debate with Yuzu. Overall, the products are of good quality and worth payment. I am buying some extra keycap sets right now before the coupon expires.

Published on October 19, 2026

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Yuzu Keycaps Review: Custom Keycaps for Weird Keyboard Layouts

This week I opened a box I had been waiting weeks for: my first fully custom keycap set.

Quick Answer: Is Yuzu Keycaps Worth It?

Yuzu Keycaps is worth considering if you need a custom keycap set for an unusual keyboard layout, want colors or legends that standard sets do not offer, or are trying to build something more personal than an off-the-shelf kit. It is not the cheapest way to buy keycaps, but the set I ordered looked professional enough that you would not know it was custom-made.

Best For	Why Yuzu Works
Unusual keyboard layouts	You can design around nonstandard key sizes and legends
Custom color schemes	Yuzu offers a large color library instead of a fixed kit
PBS or PFF profiles	Useful if you want newer profile options that are not common in mass-market sets
One-off personal designs	Good for making a set that does not look like everyone else’s keyboard
Budget keycap shopping	Probably not the best fit; generic sets are cheaper

Why Buy Custom Keycaps

If you’ve ever bought a keyboard with an unusual layout—or just wanted something no one else has—you’ve probably run into the same problem I did: standard keycap sets don’t fit your needs.

I’m a collector of keyboards and I have:

Ortholinear keyboards
Split Keyboards
Keyboards with Enter, Tab, Shift, and Backspace keys in atypical sizes
Low Profile Keyboards

But beyond that, sometimes you want to create something no one else has, or some other variation. The design sites for these services are relatively easy, but putting together an entire design is not always easy.

The Options Explored

I opted to order from Yuzu, who offers Cherry, KAM, and what prompted me to order, the recent introduction of PBS and PFF profiles. PFF is a low profile keycap profile that only recently was designed. They also offer a lot of different color choices.

There are two other purchase alternatives:

FKKeycaps, who offers custom MDA, Cherry, XDA, DSA, LPF, SLK and MBK. SLK and LBF are also low profile keycaps that work with MX style low profile switches, and MBK, which only works on Choc V1 switches. FKKeycaps only seems to offer one single color of keycap.
Thockfactory, who offer only Cherry profile. Their price for Cherry is lower than the competition, but they don’t allow for custom layouts, only several presets, but they allow a variety of colors.

The Profiles Explained

If you look down at your keyboard now, you may notice one of two things. The keycaps are all the same shape and height. This is called uniform. Where each row is a different shape and height, that would be a sculpted profile. Typists who rely on the subtle angle changes of a sculpted profile to orient their fingers may take a short time to adjust.

Standard Switch Profiles

Cherry – one of the most recognizable and popular sculpted keycap profiles. It has a maximum height of 9.4mm with a cylindrical top.
DSA – uniform profile with a height of 7.6mm and a spherical top
XDA – uniform profile with a 9.1mm height and spherical top as well as a larger surface area than DSA
KAM – uniform profile with a 9.1mm height and spherical top and a surface area in between DSA and XDA
MDA – sculpted profile with a maximum height of 12.36mm and a spherical top
SLK – A 7.5mm uniform spherical keycap that extends below the typical bottom of a switch
PBS – uniform profile with a height of 7.5mm tall, which makes it similar in height to DSA, but combines cylindrical front-to-back curvature with a spherical scoop

Low Profile Switch Profiles

Generally speaking, low profile keycaps are uniform.

PFF – 5mm tall, using the same cylindrical front-to-back curvature with a spherical scoop used in PBS, which makes it one of the few low profile keycaps that isn’t flat
LPF and MBK – are only compatible with Choc V1 low profile switches. Choc V1 switches can be lower than low profile MX switches, which PFF supports, but there is a lot less variety in general.

Yuzu: A Review

In terms of flexibility, Yuzu can’t be beat with over 300 colors. This allows you to pick colors, fonts, icons and graphics to create sets that no one has.

It is the ultimate in customization for keyboard enthusiasts. I placed an order when they started offering PBS, and received my first custom design a few weeks later…the delay due to the popularity of the new offering creating a backlog. You would not be able to tell these were custom keycaps. They look as good as the commercial ones. Why? Because Yuzu is a project of Keyreative, a commercial keycap manufacturer. Keyreative started out as an OEM manufacturer of keycaps before branching out into direct sales, so they are already the manufacturer of many keycap sets.

At the end, custom keycaps aren’t as cheap as generic sets, but they are comparable with more boutique sets. I opted for the below custom set, which is based on the popular Space Cadet design. Space Cadet was a keyboard designed in 1978 and used on LISP machines at MIT. I made some mistakes on my first foray into this, but Yuzu created a professional grade set of keycaps for me at a price that is comparable to a high quality set.

A QAZ style keyboard with custom PBS keycaps based on the popular Space Cadet design

Published on April 23, 2026