Drop/Massdrop had been on the way out for many years, I don't get the impression that they ever truly recovered from the transition away from the "group buy for anything" model. They were probably just barely kept afloat by the audiophile gear and keyboards.
Agreed. As someone who spent thousands of dollars at early Massdrop, when they switched to 'basically just a store' + their branded products the goods weren't as appealing and I eventually just stopped visiting. And that makes sense if you think about it: if a group buy gets fully funded people obviously want it.
They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
The business of demand aggregation has been replaced by Temu, where the consumer data is worth more than the average item.
Even worse, most of their products weren't special:
- available faster from Amazon
- available cheaper from AliExpress
- sometimes both faster and cheaper from the manufacturer
And Massdrop didn't provide exceptionally good customer service or warranties.
The best thing I bought from them was a pair of JBL LSR-305 powered monitors for $180. Great bedroom speakers at about a 50% discount.
Yes, that's a good point too, I never ended up buying any of my audiophile stuff from Drop because the stuff I was interested in was usually available with faster shipping from Amazon for either the same price or only a slight price increase.