I had one issue with the well-known cheap PCB service I wanted to ask the community for help with.

My ultimate goal is to make a design that looks nice, but at the same time is cheap and easy to reproduce in small amounts (of course, one can make the custom silicon keypad, but will be cheap only in large amounts, given the engineering fee). That's why I'm experimenting with PCB+slikscreen for keycaps.

Now, the PCB that produces the top parts of my keycaps looks like this: 

It's a usual FR4 PCB with a black mask and white silkscreen that would cost you a few bucks in a typical cheap PCB prototyping service. The problem is, my service insists this is a panelised PCB with 44 different designs in it (why not 45, don't they count the frame?) so they ask like 20 times more for this one compared to the other boards of the same size. I agree it's a bit of a stretch to call this a PCB, as it requires a lot of milling and so on, but x20, come on!

Has anybody had experience with it? Can you recommend a service with a more flexible policy? I guess Aisler would do this cheaper because they claim they charge simply proportional to the PCB area, but sadly they don't have a black mask option, and in any case, I'd need to order the rest elsewhere since they don't do Alu PCBs and two-layer 0.8mm thickness.