Over the last decade, I’ve been deeply immersed in the mechanical keyboard hobby, building board after board, to the point where I have amassed quite a collection. The thing is, I’ve built so many keyboards that I can’t remember what I used to build them all. From switches to caps, some of the names escape me. My intention was always to go back and catalog each build, along with what it was built with, but soon enough, even this grew into a fairly large task, so I’ve been slacking, big time.
Well, over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing my builds, one by one, on X (Twitter) and Reddit. My goal is to post one board every week for the next year, and I have more than enough to accomplish this, each a unique build. Thanks to these social posts, I learned about the Keebuilder app, which has proven to be the perfect platform for cataloging my builds as I post them to social media each week. I finally have a place to list all the details of my builds, and I can even share them with the Keebuilder community. So far, I’m having a blast.
Keebuilder makes it easy to track your keyboard builds and share them
Keebuilder offers both an iOS app and an Android app, with the Android app only recently leaving beta. For the last few weeks, I’ve been posting new builds with ease, not to mention piling up likes for my posts, which feels validating that I have some awesome builds on my hands. All the while, every time I add a board to the app, I’m building out a personal database, so I’ll no longer have to dig through receipts to remember what each board contains. Best of all, this information can be exported, which means I’m ultimately not dependent on Keebuilder, should the app be abandoned.
Navigating the Keebuilder app is a breeze, but it’s still a work in progress
Keebuilder Builds tab and grid layout
The Keebuilder interface is incredibly easy to navigate. There are five tabs at the bottom of the app: Build, Gallery, Reviews, ICs, and Profile. The Build tab is where you can add and view your builds. There is also an option to view this list as a grid, which is handy for viewing more builds at once.
The Gallery tab is where every member’s board is shared with the Keebuilder community. You can click on each build to see more images and the parts used, along with a fun upvote button to encourage the builds you enjoy. You can even converse with builders and users in a comments section for each listing. So far, communication has been minimal, but I expect it to increase as the community grows.
Now, the Reviews tab isn’t for reviews of keyboards, but rather the vendors that sell them and their parts. There does appear to be a section on this page that says coming soon, so perhaps more will be done with the Reviews tab moving forward. However, I can’t imagine it’s easy to track every store, especially when exit scams still occur frequently. Ideally, this section will grow into something a bit more useful than a list of stores you can slap a star rating on. At the very least, this tab offers a quick clue of who the more trusted sellers are in the community.
Keebuilder Gallery, Reviews, and ICs tabs
The next tab is called ICs, which stands for Interest Checks, referring to the current interest checks being run for various keysets and keyboards. This feels like something that will be hard to scale as the app grows. Over the years, I’ve seen numerous websites built for the purpose of tracking group buys and interest checks, but none are still standing. Perhaps there is a way to utilize AI to scrape forums like Geekhack to pull this data to keep the list of ICs in Keebuilder up to date, but for now, few are listed, so it works more like a curated list.
The last tab is Profile, where your username and password can be changed. You can also toggle weekly emails from the Keebuilder app from this screen, should you want community news delivered directly to your inbox.
Adding new builds is a pleasure
Each week, I look forward to adding a new build to Keebuilder as part of my #keebaweek project, and adding the boards is incredibly straightforward. Simply tap on the Add New Build button on the Builds homescreen, and you’re off to the races.
It’s a three-step process to add a new build to Keebuilder, and the first screen requires you to detail the board, its plate, and PCB. This is also where you add your images. The second screen is where you can add the switches you used, the keycaps, the stabilizers, any notes, and the price of the build (I tend to leave this blank).
Screenshots of adding a new build to Keebuilder
The third screen is where you can add tags to the build, such as the board size, the layout it’s using, the mounting style, case material/finish, and more, allowing you to fully detail precisely what kind of keyboard you’ve built. Clearly, the app designer knows mechanical keyboards, and these varied options demonstrate it. At no point have I felt that any options to describe my boards were missing from the app.
Keebuilder is what convinced me to finally catalog my collection
This isn’t even every board; there are more, which means I still have work to do
The fact is, I’ve built many, many keyboards, and over time, I’ve forgotten precisely what I used to build them. This weighed on me, as I had gone through the trouble of building them, having spent a lot of money, but outside of Reddit and Discord, there really hadn’t been much opportunity to share them with like-minded hobbyists. Worse, I know I’d have to go through the trouble of digging up my receipts to jot down the parts used, and while that still holds true using the Keebuilder app, at the very least, I now have a central place to add my boards and the parts used, and I get to share them with people who ideally will appreciate my efforts. That’s a win to me, and it wouldn’t have been possible without an app like Keebuilder.
That’s all to say, if you, too, are looking for an easy way to catalog your mechanical keyboard builds and share them, the Keebuilder app is the first place you should be looking. You can snag the iOS install from the App Store, and the Android version is out of beta and officially available on the Play Store. Jump to your preferred store from the widgets below. Enjoy!
