Astrohaus has cornered a very specific niche. The Michigan-based startup builds hardware for writers looking to eliminate distractions. It’s really tough finishing up that novel when Instagram exists, after all.
While the company has made its name bucking most tech trends, however, its latest offering has found a bandwagon to jump onto. Announced at CES 2025, Wordrunner embraces the mechanical keyboard boom while staying true to Astrohaus’ mission statement of distraction-free writing.
The Freewrite Wordrunner is, in essence, a standard mechanical keyboard with a few writer-focused tricks up its sleeve. Specifically, the peripheral has a Wordometer (word count) and a “sprint timer” for writes.
The idea is to bake productivity tools directly into the product itself. Astrohaus is essentially offering a way to bypass writing apps and focus on the writing itself.
“Writers use keyboards more than almost anyone else, yet they’ve never had professional-grade tools built specifically for them,” founder and CEO Adam Leeb says. “While gamers have an entire industry creating specialized features for them, writers have been forced to rely on general-purpose keyboards and add-on software to track their work. Wordrunner transforms this relationship by making the keyboard itself an active participant in the writing process — not just a passive input device, but a true writing companion.”
The keyboard is aluminum, with floating keys and a red control knob. The system is launching on Kickstarter in February, with a planned late-2025 shipping.