Vellum TKL review: good board, bad firmware

A good keyboard, thrown away

The Vellum TKL is physically an $80 board being sold for $68.

Gasket mount with 2.6 mm of measured flex — genuine, between the Ferrule and the Castor. Stabilisers done properly on every large key. Cherry-profile PBT keycaps included. Gateron Brown Pros, consistent across the board at a measured 56.1 g. It sounds clean at 56.1 dB and it feels considered.

Then you try to move control to caps lock and discover that you cannot.

The firmware, or the absence of it

There is no remapping. Not limited remapping, not remapping through bad software, not remapping behind a paywall. There is no mechanism of any kind.

No VIA. No QMK. No vendor configurator to download. No key combination that puts the board into a programming mode. What is printed on the keycaps is what the board does, and that is permanent.

This is genuinely unusual. Most cheap keyboards ship with something — a crude Windows utility, a basic web configurator, a two-layer on-board macro system. Shipping a hot-swap gasket-mounted board in 2026 with no configurability at all is a decision someone made.

Why this matters more than it sounds

If you have never remapped a key, this paragraph is irrelevant to you and you can skip it.

If you have, you know that the remaps you rely on are invisible to you until they are gone. Control on caps lock. Escape somewhere reachable. A function layer for media keys. These are not preferences so much as motor patterns, and typing on a board that does not have them is like typing with one finger splinted.

The workaround is operating-system remapping — PowerToys, Karabiner, xremap. It works. What it does not do is travel with the keyboard: the mapping lives on the computer, so plugging the board into a different machine gives you the default layout again, and every new machine needs setting up.

For a board you would otherwise want to carry between a desktop and a laptop, that is a real cost.

The wireless

Bluetooth only, no 2.4 GHz dongle, and it drops.

When new it disconnected roughly once a day, requiring a re-pair rather than an automatic reconnect. After two months that is up to about twice a day. Measured latency is 16.3 ms wireless against 7.8 ms wired, at 500 Hz polling.

Wired is completely stable and has never dropped an input. The practical position is that this is a wired keyboard that has a Bluetooth mode you should not depend on.

Three months in

The Bluetooth got worse, not better. I dropped the software score from 3 to 2 to reflect that, which is the sort of change the timeline exists to record — the original figure stays visible rather than being quietly replaced.

Everything physical is unchanged. Stabilisers still clean, gaskets not visibly compressed, no case creak, no socket looseness. The build quality is not in question.

Who this is for

Someone who uses a default layout, never remaps anything, and wants gasket-mount typing feel as cheaply as possible. That person exists and for them this is a genuine bargain — $68 for this build is good value.

For anyone else, the Quarry TKL is $4 more with QMK firmware you can compile yourself, and the comparison between them comes down almost entirely to that one difference.

It is a frustrating board, and the frustration is specifically that it did not have to be.