Tracking Your Keycap Drops Without Losing Your Mind
Journal For Custom Keycaps Weekly
Journal For Custom Keycaps Weekly is a curated newsletter and tracking system that consolidates new keycap releases, limited runs, and group buys happening in the custom mechanical keyboard space. It pulls from multiple designers and manufacturers—Wooting, GMK, Drops, and smaller Etsy shops—into a single weekly digest so you don't have to check twelve different Discord servers every morning. I started following it around mid-2023 when I was trying to keep up with both the PIM440 and the Space Invaders II restocks. The newsletter saves you roughly 45 minutes a week of aimless scrolling through r/mechanicalkeyboards. Not that I stopped scrolling anyway. The core value is its drop calendar. Each week they publish an HTML table listing every known release: the product name, material (PBT, ABS, PA12), switch compatibility notes, pricing, and the store link. They also tag items by launch type—immediate buy, group buy, or pre-order—so you can filter by your tolerance for waiting months for keycaps that may or may not ship.
One thing beginners consistently miss is that the weekly digest doesn't cover everything. Smaller designers on Instagram or limited to their own storefronts often slip through. I learned this the hard way when I missed a run from a maker called KeycapKing who only announced drops via their own Telegram channel. The workaround I settled on was subscribing to the RSS feed from the keycap subreddit and cross-referencing it with the newsletter every Friday. Takes three minutes. The download option matters more than most people realize. You can export the weekly tracker as a CSV file, which I use to build a personal pivot table tracking price history. GMK sets like the "Dracula" collection tend to appreciate 15–40% within six months, and having a spreadsheet with purchase dates and current market values on eBay makes it easier to decide whether to hold or sell. A lot of people just guess at that. There are limitations worth noting upfront. The newsletter does not verify whether a group buy is legitimate before listing it. I once saw a fake "GMK-compatible" run listed as an official Drop collaboration. It was a knockoff. The author caught it by the fourth edition and added a source verification section, but you still need to double-check the store URL yourself. Another gap is that pricing is listed in the original store currency, so if you're in Europe dealing with a US-only shop, factor in shipping and VAT before you click buy. The weekly email doesn't include those calculations.
If you're serious about building a keycap collection, this is one of the few resources that actually earns a weekly spot in your inbox. It won't replace the community discussions or the unboxing videos, but it will tell you what's dropping before the stock runs out. Most of the time. Download link: Journal For Custom Keycaps Weekly The archive goes back to January 2023, so you can dig through past weeks to see which designers are consistently late on deliveries. That alone is worth something.
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