Early personal computer keyboards could be membrane (Atari 400, ZX80, ZX81), chiclet (PET 2001, ZX Spectrum, Oric, IBM PC Jr) or mechanical/full-travel (later PET, Apple II, TRS-80, Vic-20, and most everything else), in increasing order of cost, quality and frequency.

Intuitively, I would be inclined to think either the keyboard matters more to your target market than cost or it doesn't, and in the latter case you might as well use a membrane keyboard, being the cheapest option, but empirically, chiclet keyboards were more common. I'm curious about the thought process that went into this; was it the case that a chiclet keyboard is still pretty cheap, or that a membrane keyboard was just considered too abominably bad to be tolerable?

We do have an estimate for the cost of a mechanical keyboard: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#Manufacturing_cost> puts it at $10. If the cost to the manufacturer of a chiclet keyboard was, say, $2, that would indicate one rationale for its use, and if the cost was $8, that would indicate another rationale.

Is there any known data for the cost of a chiclet keyboard, or estimate of how it compared to the other options?