There is a Corne on Amazon for under £50. It’s more expensive than they are from the Chinese sites, but not by much. This makes the split keyboard life a possibility for normal people, but also probably means I’ll be unlikely to build and sell these at a profit any longer, because I just can’t compete with those prices. I do have one of these boards as a spare, but have not really used it in anger at this point. It does look like a solid choice for a newcomer though, and there are even versions with switches and keycaps for people who don’t have lots of both lying around at home.
The other great consumer board that’s flooding the market right now is the Silakka54. This has basically the same layout as the older Cornes, but with an additional number row. This makes it a slightly less steep learning curve, which might make it more appealing. I think if I was starting again then this is what I would start with, and it’s good to see there are a few options for cases appearing now, which wasn’t true when I picked mine up about a year ago. This is a keyboard I want to spend more time with soon, because I very much like the way it looks and sounds, and the muscle memory from 5 years of typing on Cornes is very much transferable.
Both of these should be available for under £50 as bare bones boards; maybe £20 more if you want switches and keycaps.
There are also plenty of more normal keyboards on the market that are under £20 right now, and which are easy enough to harvest switches and keycaps from. The two I’ve had the most success with are the Ajazz Alice Boards and the Geeky GK65. Pick these up when they are under £20 and you get switches and keycaps, plus a decent enough keyboard to mod at a later date. I’m increasingly finding that this is the cheapest way to get my split boards built, which is definitely not where we were a couple of years ago.