How Quantity Moves the Price of a Machined Case

September 21, 2026

The most common planning mistake in a keyboard project is picking a target number first and asking for a price second. The price curve has a shape, and if you know the shape you can pick a number that sits in the right part of it.

What stays the same whatever you order

A machined case carries a block of cost that does not care how many you buy.

Programming and setup. Someone writes the toolpaths, proves them out and sets the machine. That happens once for a run of five and once for a run of five hundred.

Fixtures and soft jaws. A case needs work holding for each setup, and the fixtures are themselves machined parts. This is often quoted separately as tooling, and on a repeat run you should not pay for it twice.

First article. The first part off the machine gets measured properly. That inspection is the same work whether it is followed by nine parts or nine hundred.

Anodising setup. This is the big one. Racking, degreasing, etching, the tank itself and the dye bath all have a batch cost. A finishing house has a minimum charge and a minimum load, and forty cases may not fill either.

What scales with quantity

Cutting time and stock. That is almost it.

Each additional case costs a block of aluminium and the spindle hours to turn most of it into chips. Those are real costs and they are why the curve never flattens completely, but they are a much smaller share of the total than people expect at low quantities.

Where the curve bends

Roughly, and it varies by design and by shop:

1 to 5 pieces. Prototype territory. Per unit cost can be ten to twenty times a production unit. This is not a shop being difficult. You are paying for the entire setup block divided by a handful of parts, and it is money well spent anyway, because a prototype is the cheapest insurance in the project.

10 to 49. Still setup dominated. The per unit price falls fast across this range, but you are probably not filling an anodising load, so you are paying for a batch you did not fill.

50 to 150. The curve is bending hard. Most of the setup is now spread thin and the anodising load is filling up. This is where a lot of small vendor runs live.

150 to 500. The curve is flattening. You are now mostly paying for metal and machine hours. Going from 200 to 300 saves less per unit than going from 60 to 100 did.

Over 500. You are negotiating on stock price and machine rate, not on setup. Different conversation.

What this means for a buy target

If your interest check suggests you can sell somewhere between 80 and 200, the honest answer is that 200 will be meaningfully cheaper per unit than 80 and you should set your minimum accordingly.

If your interest check suggests 300 against 500, the difference per unit is much smaller, and pushing for 500 may cost you more in extended buy window and inventory risk than it saves in unit price.

The only way to know which situation you are in is to ask for prices at three quantities. Every shop will give you that. Almost nobody asks.

The overage question

Cosmetic machining has a scrap rate. A part that measures correctly still fails if it has a witness mark on a chamfer or a blemish that survived the blast, and on an anodised finish there is no rework, only a new part from raw stock.

So a shop making 200 good cases starts more than 200 blanks. Who pays for the overage, and what happens to the spares, is a conversation to have before the purchase order rather than after. Many organisers sell the extras, which turns a cost line into a small buffer against the units that get damaged in transit.

A shop that promises exactly 200 good cases from exactly 200 blanks has told you something important about its experience, and it is not what it meant to tell you.

Cheap ways to move the price that are not quantity

Before you push the quantity up to chase a price, check the cheaper levers. Fewer setups in the model, tolerances only where they matter, a finishing route with one vendor rather than three, and a realistic date will each take real money out of a quote. Those are covered in where the money goes.

Quantity is the loudest lever, but it is also the one that puts your own money at risk. Pull the design levers first.

Quantity is one line of the full budget in our guide to keyboard case manufacturing cost.

Frequently asked questions

What is the minimum a shop will accept?

Many shops will quote a single prototype, so there is rarely a hard floor. What changes is the price per unit, which climbs steeply below about fifty pieces because setup and the anodising batch are fixed costs however few parts share them.

Why is 200 not much more expensive than 100?

Because a large part of the job happens once regardless of quantity: programming, fixtures, first article, anodising racking and bath setup. Doubling the quantity roughly doubles only the cutting time and the stock.

Should I quote at one quantity or several?

Several, always. Ask for 50, 150 and 300 on the same RFQ. The shape of the curve tells you where your buy target should sit, and it costs the shop almost nothing to give you three numbers instead of one.

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