It's $255 and doesn't come with any switches from what I can tell. Not the person you're responding to but I've heard good things about the UHK: https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

I didn’t like it, despite waiting a couple of years (I think) for mine to ship.

The lack of Esc is just plain stupid and needlessly “special” for a hackers keyboard, especially with zero space constraints. The keys themselves I’m not a fan of, but that’s because nothing beats the buckling spring keys I’m used to - so not counting that against them. Build quality is great, however.

Can't you remap one of the other keys to be escape - I think for those who care keyboard layout is highly personal - I can find somebody has designed a keyboard that looks great and then make layout choices I find very strange. But if the keyboard uses qmk then I can easily fix that.

If you're not happy then build your own - or buy a unicomp board and replace the controller so you get the best of both worlds - buckling spring and programmable keyboard.

I have the UHK, I really like it (it is so far the best keyboard I've used). I could make use of another row of keys, but they chose to minimize size, which makes the keyboard nicely portable (especially if you put the two halves together back-to-back).

A big part of the appeal of the UHK is the agent, which lets you configure the keyboard any way you want. Not all keyboards let you do this, so it's often an apples to oranges comparison.

That's not much for a high-end keyboard. Spend some time browsing http://reddit.com/r/mechmarket/ . You can pay north of $1K if you want to, especially on a rare board; new ones are commonly around $500. Just one recent example: https://zealpc.net/collections/custom-keyboards/products/gb-... .

That’s nothing when you venture into the world of Korean custom keyboards. ~$500 for the case (usually milled out of quarter-inch thick aluminum with a solid brass weight) and PCB. Then add switches and custom key caps.

I have a Keyboardio Model 01: https://shop.keyboard.io/

The Kickstarter version cost $250, they go for $329 now. It's really comfortable, and I use the palm-switch and thumb keys very naturally.

VE.A2 is probably $500 or $400 at least now