Review: WobKey Rainy 75 Mechanical Keyboard

The Rainy 75 is a common sight on the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, a community that nerds out about the thock of a keyboard and, naturally, fun keycaps. It seems like every week or so, someone posts about their new purchase from WobKey, and every time, the consensus revolves around how good of a budget option it is. That's because, for under $150, the Rainy 75 has every feature you could want in a mechanical keyboard today. There are a few strange design choices, but I finally got my hands on one, and I’m impressed by this keyboard.

The Rainy 75 is available in three flavors: Lite, Standard, and Pro. The Lite retails for $129 and includes HMX Violet linear switches, a polypropylene plate, and a 3,500-mAh battery. The Pro—the model I tested—includes Kailh Cocoa linear switches, an FR4 plate, RGB lighting, and two batteries totaling 7,000 mAh for $159. The Standard is in between and costs $139.

Poppy, Crisp, and Smooth

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Typing on the Rainy 75 feels and sounds fantastic. It has that poppy, crisp typing sound you see in videos online, and typing feels every bit as energetic and enjoyable. I assume the “Rainy 75” name comes from the typing sound, since its softer and rounded sound profile sounds like rain falling.

The linear “Cocoa” switches are manufactured by Kailh for the Rainy 75. These switches have a relatively light operating force of 45 grams, which is comparable to a Cherry MX Red, and use a polyoxymethylene stem (POM) and Nylon housing, which helps to create a marbly typing sound and a smooth typing feel. The switches are responsive, popping back up quickly after being pressed, and have hardly any scratch, even when pressed down slowly. The stems of these switches have little wobble from side to side or front to back, making keypresses feel sturdy.

The stabilizers on this keyboard come pre-lubed and, despite being plate-mounted instead of printed-circuit-board–mounted, they feel fantastic. While I could talk about how smooth and quiet they are, it’s easier to say that I didn’t even notice they were there when typing. These stabilizers are tuned perfectly and don’t require any work out of the box. That said, I imagine that, like most plate-mounted stabilizers, they will require a reapplication of lube after a while.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The gasket-mount system holding the keyboard together is really impressive. It feels bouncy and soft without seeming too muted or mushy. The dampening from the gaskets is consistent across all of the keys, only becoming somewhat stiffer around the edges.

Finicky Functionality

This keyboard has some quirks that, while not huge, can be annoying. Sometimes, when pressing Alt+Tab on this keyboard, or any other key combinations involving the Tab key, I have to press the combination twice for it to work. I've resolved these oddities by turning the keyboard off and on.

Typically, one of my favorite features on a mechanical keyboard is support for QMK and VIA. QMK, short for Quantum Mechanical Keyboard, is an open source firmware that allows for almost limitless customization of a keyboard’s layout. VIA is a system for customizing specific QMK-compatible keyboards using an in-browser interface. These allow for simple and efficient customization of mechanical keyboards, meaning a QMK-enabled keyboard will have long-term support without reliance on proprietary software that may stop being updated after a few years.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

While the Rainy 75 is compatible with both QMK and VIA, I had trouble getting VIA to work even after trying to update the firmware and performing a factory reset. For some reason, the unit I was sent could connect to VIA only when using the wireless dongle and completely refused to connect on a wired connection. However, once connected, I didn’t have any issues using VIA to reprogram the keyboard—the system was easily able to adjust the lighting, function layers, and key map, and edits persisted even when the keyboard was connected to other devices.

The RGB lighting is easy to program with VIA and looks bright even in direct sunlight. The onboard RGB customization is severely limited, however. Without VIA, you can swap between only a small handful of colors and animations, along with some rainbow RGB effects.

I was impressed by the wireless connectivity. I never encountered any lag with the 2.4-GHz dongle, and the keyboard connected instantly every time I started to type. Bluetooth worked consistently as well, and the multi-device connectivity never ran into issues during my testing. To swap between multiple devices or make any other adjustments to this keyboard, you need to remember a specific key combination. Pressing the Fn key illuminates all of the keys that have some kind of functionality, making it easier to remember which keys to press.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

To enable wireless connectivity, you have to remove the Caps Lock key to access a small on/off switch underneath, which I found strange and inconvenient, especially if you bring this keyboard with you somewhere and forget to bring a keycap puller.

Whether wired or wireless, the keyboard was responsive enough to hold up to even fast-paced gaming. The keyboard operates at 1,000 Hz in ultralow-latency mode and claims to have a 2-millisecond response time when wired. While it obviously won’t have the same responsiveness as a gaming-focused Hall Effect board, it fared well even compared to larger brands like Razer.

Built Like a Tank

The sheer density of this keyboard is what struck me first: It is heavy. You could knock someone out with this if you needed to. It weighs almost 4.5 pounds, with a case made of two large pieces of aluminum and a steel weight embedded in the back. The Pro model’s case is colored using electrophoretic coating, which uses electricity to bind paint to the case. This results in a fairly durable uniform finish and allows for impressive color accuracy.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The Rainy 75 is held together with six Phillips-head screws around the edges of the case, all of which are hidden underneath the keycaps. To take this keyboard apart, you need to remove 11 keycaps and one switch. Once the keyboard is apart, the printed circuit board (PCB) and plate are held in place by 14 small, cylindrical, rubber gaskets that clip into the PCB. These isolate the internal assembly from the case to limit noise and create a “bouncy” typing feel with a softer bottom-out. This softness is enhanced further by the “flex-cuts” that surround each switch—these are small cutouts that allow each switch on the PCB to slightly flex downward when pressed.

While I like the gasket mount structure, I’m disappointed that the Rainy 75 doesn’t come with any extra gaskets, especially when the Mchose GX87 includes a handful of extra gaskets. They’re incredibly small and easy to lose, and the inclusion would have likely only cost a few extra cents. There doesn’t appear to be any way to purchase replacement gaskets in the US, although some international vendors appear to have them in stock.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The keycaps are double-shot polybutylene terephthalate (PBT), which means they are made of two different colors of plastic molded into one piece. This means the text legends on the keycaps will never wear away and, because they’re made of PBT plastic, the keycaps will take far longer to shine than the standard acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. The keycaps are all standard sizes, meaning they can easily be swapped with any other set. The hot-swap sockets mean the Rainy 75 is incredibly customizable if the switches or keycaps aren’t quite to your preference.

Overall, the Rainy 75 is one of the best budget mechanical keyboards I’ve tested. Despite a few technical issues, it punches above its weight in both typing feel and technical performance. This keyboard is snappy, responsive, and feels great to type on, all while having an incredibly durable and heavy-duty case.