The Cheapest Ultralight Fingertip Mouse - Is It Any Good?

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I started the journey towards the Li’l Magnum! when I printed a large skeletal shell from MakerWorld for a fake Logitech F304 mouse that you can get on Aliexpress for $8. That build was around 40 grams when I started. I was able to shave it down to 33 grams, but I wanted more. I wanted a smaller, lighter, mouse that felt more solid, and I wanted to use a nicer donor mouse, so I started designing my own.

I built the first Li’l Magnum! around a $45 VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro. The first print was up near 24 grams, while the current iteration is more rigid and clicks nicer while weighing in at only 20.4 grams. It is a fantastic little mouse!

Li'l Magnum! shell for the UHURU WM-09 wireless mouse

Then I modified the Li’l Magnum! to fit the $19 VXE Dragonfly R1 SE. That build currently comes in at 21.5 grams. Last week, my VXE Mad R made it through customs, and I now have a 16.4-gram Li’l Magnum! that only cost me $43!

These are all fantastic, but you may have to wait several weeksfor you mouse time for your donor mouse to arrive from Aliexpress. To help you sidestep that problem, I ordered a McHose L7 Ultra from Amazon for $66, and it was in my hands and in a newly designed Li’l Magnum! shell the next day.

The L7 Ultra is an awesome mouse with a fantastic sensor, optical switches, and a nice lightweight PCB layout. At 18.26 grams, it doesn’t come in as light as Li’l Magnum! built using a Mad R, but it is close, and you can have one in your hands within 24 hours.

That got me thinking. There must be a decent and extremely inexpensive mouse on Amazon that you could have in your hands in a day or two. It seemed like I should search around and see what I could find.

How about a tl;dr?!

My feelings here are complicated. When I pushed the grips back about 20 mm to make a longboy Li’l Magnum!, I learned that the UHURU mouse makes a delightful $10 longer Zeromouse-style ultralight mouse.

The longboy isn’t perfect. I threw together the bigger grips quickly and haphazardly, but it does work pretty well. The mouse is only $10. It isn’t easy to tell that the electronics aren’t equivalent to the VXE Mad R or McHose L7 Ultra while you are using it. The long version of the UHURU Li’l Magnum! comes out to 26.3 grams. That is only 10 grams heavier than my lightest fingertip-style Li’l Magnum!.

It is hard to not be a little excited about this. You can build yourself a 26-gram gaming mouse for $10, and it actually feels pretty good.

Read on if you’re wondering about the caveats.

The UHURU WM-09 wireless gaming mouse

The UHURU mouse has been available on Amazon for sixteen months, and it has been priced at $9.59 for almost a month so far. It claims to use the same PAW3395 as my VXE R1 Pro and VXE Mad R, and I definitely believe that after taking these mice apart.

I skimmed through some reviews on r/MouseReview. Most of the complaints were related to the shell. The left click on some UHURU mice feels crummy. The plastic is cheap. The RGB LEDs burning out seems to be a common problem. None of this is terribly relevant to building a Li’l Magnum! ultralight mouse, because we will be throwing the heavy shell away.

UHURU vs. VXE Mad R Li'l Magnum! shells

NOTE: I had zero problems with my UHURU mouse. The clicks felt consistent. Motion seems fine. I don’t have a way to measure latency, but it seems identical to all my other mice. The problems noted in the reviews on Reddit imply that either UHURU’s quality control is poor, or they’ve fixed these deficiencies since those reviews were written. Even if you aren’t turning your UHURU mouse into a Li’l Magnum!, it sure seems like a decent $10 wireless gaming mouse that punches well above its price point.

The biggest reason that I started designing around the VXE R1 is that there is a model available for $19. I don’t want you to have to spend $150 on a Zeromouse Blade only to learn that you hate fingertip mice, or that you hate superlight mice.

I want you to be able to spend $10 or $20 on your ultralight gaming mouse experiment. Maybe you’ll enjoy the experience, and that will encourage you to buy a Zeromouse, build a Li’l Magnum! using a nicer donor mouse, or maybe you’ll try a 27-gram G-Wolves mouse. I am excited about lowering the barrier to entry and democratizing the world of ultralight mice.

What’s a better deal than a $19 mouse with a 19,000-DPI PAW3395SE sensor from Aliexpress? Hopefully a $10 mouse with a 26,000-DPI PAW3395 sensor that can be at your door within 24 hours.

But Pat! Don’t I need a 16-gram Li’l Magnum! build?

I suspect that lighter is better, and that it would be awesome if we could get a mouse down to 5 or 10 grams, but I also don’t think the difference would be all that noticeable.

All my Li’l Magnum! builds are set to 3,200 DPI. My heaviest Li’l Magnum! builds are using my old Corsair Katar Pro wireless mouse and the UHURU mouse. Both weigh just over 26 grams. It doesn’t matter which Li’l Magnum! I am using. After playing for a while, I start to forget which one is in my hand. I am not constantly upset that I am using a heavier model. I completely forget that the heavier mouse isn’t 16 grams.

Li'l Magnum! VXE Mad R at 16.4 grams!

The Li’l Magnum! built with a VXE Mad R mouse weighing in at just 16.4 grams!

I do wish I could do an actual blind test of each of all these mice, but they are all easy to identify. The VXE Mad R at 16 grams feels like a feather compared to the 21.4-gram R1 SE. My two R1 mice are within a gram of each other, but the R1 SE has heavier and louder switches, so it is obvious which one is which. You can tell the difference between most of these mice just by the feel or sound of the clicks.

If the difference in price between $10, $19, $43, or $66 doesn’t mean much to you, I would build a Li’l Magnum! around the VXE Mad R. You get a nice sensor, optical switches, an 8K receiver, and a 16-gram build. All those things easily add up to $30 in value.

I can’t believe how good the UHURU Li’l Magnum! feels!

The UHURU mouse isn’t perfect. It has a LONG circuit board. It sticks out the back of the fingertip shell by 40 mm more than any other Li’l Magnum! build. It is less than ideal for a fingertip mouse, but it works quite well for a longer grip layout like the Zeromouse. I have uploaded a first attempt at a long Li’l Magnum! shell for the UHURU WM-09.

This is the hardest Li’l Magnum! to assemble. I had to trim the leads for the microswitches off the bottom of the PCB in order to manage to slide the board into the Li’l Magnum! shell without breaking the button flappers. I also had to put a piece of electrical tape over that awful LED that indicates the DPI setting. And if you are building a longboy out of the UHURU mouse, you’re going to have to bend and flex the shell quite a bit to finagle the PCB past the upper support.

Even though the UHURU is my second heaviest Li’l Magnum! at 25.38 grams, and I’ve gotten used to playing Team Fortress 2 with a 16.43-gram mouse, the UHURU still feels extremely light. The odds are high that this mouse has the worst latency of any of my other Li’l Magnum! builds, but I couldn’t tell you that by feel. It is almost impossible to perceive the different between 0.4 milliseconds and 1.5 milliseconds, especially when the entire system has 15 to 25 milliseconds of total latency.

I played a round of Team Fortress 2 with the first functioning prototype printing, and I played exactly as I would with any of my other mice. I expected the long circuit board to bump into my palm when aiming downward, and I am pretty sure I did feel the electrical tape on that LED once or twice, but it isn’t really a problem. The part of the UHURU that sticks out the back is extremely close to the mouse pad.

Should you buy an UHURU mouse for your Li’l Magnum! mod?

I dislike how many compromises I had to make. I didn’t want anyone to have to modify their circuit boards, but I don’t think snipping four leads is much of a modification. I don’t like the long PCB. The rotated buttons mean my post-travel stops don’t work on the UHURU.

That said, I think these compromises are extremely reasonable for a mouse that can arrive at your door tomorrow for $10. As with any other Li’l Magnum!, you’ll need to order some skates as well. I imagine that you could take a pair of scissors to the stock skates, but I have no idea how well that might work!

If you’re on a tight budget, and you can wait two weeks, I think you are much better off ordering a VXE R1 SE for $19. You’ll have a smaller, lighter, cleaner, and probably lower latency Li’l Magnum!, and it doesn’t cost that much more.

If you can’t wait two weeks, and you’re not on a tight budget, then the McHose L7 Ultra is a fantastic mouse for a premium Li’l Magnum! experience.

I know this isn’t a ringing endorsement, but the UHURU WM-09 is just fine if you can’t use Aliexpress. This is especially true if you think you’ll prefer the longboy layout. Maybe you’re on a tight budget, or maybe you’re extremely skeptical about even using an ultralight mouse. Maybe you’re looking for a fun and inexpensive project, and 3D printing a mouse tonight that you can assemble tomorrow seems like a lot of fun.

The UHURU is a good PCB for a longboy Li’l Magnum!

I feel like I should warn you before I get you excited about this. The Li’l Magnum! is extremely customizable, but the farther you get from my own preferences, the less well thought out and supported things get.

The default Li’l Magnum! is a short fingertip mouse that is made to be comfortable in my hand. One of my early experiments was to push the grips back to line up with the Zeromouse Blade. This makes for a much longer mouse, and the way I wind up gripping a mouse like that really isn’t much different than how I hold my Logitech G305. There just isn’t a hump of a mouse to rest my palm on.

The UHURU PCB is long, so I figured it’d be a good mouse to try this experiment with again. I moved the grips back to where I would grab my Logitech mouse, made the grips a but way taller than usual, and made sure the arms were attached to the most appropriate points at the base.

If this is the style of grip layout you want, I will say that it’ll be hard to beat the $10 UHURU WM-09. The PCB still sticks out the back, but not by that much. Having that extra length of PCB means I get to brace the arms better than I could on a longboy Li’l Magnum! using any of the other shorter PCBs.

It isn’t perfect. Those tall grips are a little more squishy. The brace across the top helps, but it is still softer than a fingertip Li’l Magnum!.

This layout isn’t for me. I have grown to like the fingertip grip. My aim was usually great with the longboy, right up until it wasn’t! Sometimes my muscle memory was expecting to be able to continue to move the mouse with my wrist, but my wrist just wouldn’t go any farther. I gamed with regular mice and longboy-style grip for years. I am sure I could get used to it again quickly. I just don’t want to.

I won’t put this Li’l Magnum! shell in my Tindie store

I have two reasons. I am not quite proud enough of this particular Li’l Magnum! build to put it up for sale. The UHURU PCB just isn’t an ideal fit, and I can’t work around its limitations well enough. I also don’t think anyone should spend twice as much on the plastic shell as they do on the electronics that go inside.

I still think it is a great Li’l Magnum! if you can print your own. Turning a $10 mouse purchase into something that is 80% or 90% as good as my most premium Li’l Magnum! is totally awesome!

This is more than a little subjective, but I really do feel that the UHURU Li’l Magnum! really does perform almost 90% as well as my two most premium builds. The trouble is that the part that sticks out the back is so ugly! It doesn’t tend to get in the way when I am gaming, and being able to mount the battery so far back does make the UHURU Li’l Magnum! feel lighter than it actually is, but it makes it looks so much more kludged together.

This makes two shells that I won’t stock in my Tindie store. The other is for the Corsair Katar Pro wireless mouse. That one is a similar weight to the UHURU, but it doesn’t have an elongated PCB. That mouse also feels fantastic, but you can’t buy it anymore, and I hate that I had to solder a USB-C rechargeable AAA battery in to power it up.

Conclusion: Lightweight innovation is within your reach

The journey to crafting the perfect ultralight mouse isn’t about chasing a single magic number—it’s about finding the balance between cost, creativity, and performance that works for you. Whether you’re modding a $10 UHURU WM-09 for next-day tinkering, patiently waiting for a budget-friendly VXE Dragonfly R1, or splurging on a more premium McHose L7 Ultra or VXE Mad R, the Li’l Magnum! project proves that an ultralight gaming mouse doesn’t have to break the bank or test your patience. Each build, from the featherweight 16-gram Mad R to the (almost?) “good enough” UHURU, opens a door to experimentation, proving that even compromises can lead to surprisingly satisfying results.

But this isn’t just about mice—it’s about community. The enjoyment of sharing a mod, troubleshooting a print, or geeking out over sensor specs is what turns solo projects into collective breakthroughs. That’s where you come in.

Join the conversation on Discord!

Whether you’re a seasoned modder or a curious newbie, our growing community is the perfect place to:

  • Share your Li’l Magnum! builds
  • Get tips on trimming weights, tweaking shells, or choosing donor mice
  • Stay updated on new designs and experiments
  • Connect with fellow enthusiasts who believe that great gaming gear doesn’t have to cost a fortune

Let’s democratize ultralight mice together—one print, one mod, and one Discord message at a time. Join our friendly Discord community and turn your curiosity into creation!

P.S. Even if your first build has a few rough edges (literally), we’ve all been there. Bring your questions, your triumphs, and that $10 mouse you’re secretly proud of—we can’t wait to see what you’ll build next. 🐭✨

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