HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly
HP is informing customers by email about an upcoming HP Instant Ink price increase. Prices increase by up to 50%.
At their "cheapest" 0.099 euro / $0.11 USD tier it is already literally cheaper per page (albeit certainly not faster) for me to print documents as 8.5x11" 0.1mm thick single layer slabs of plastic on my 3D printer.
An entire "blank" page, i.e. no cutouts for text or anything, would be about 0.754 grams of plastic. That's about $0.0143 per page at a not-too-exorbitant retail cost of PLA filament ($18.99 USD for a kilo) and the material usage would be even less once the negative space for text is subtracted. And I don't even have to buy the paper.
That's mind boggling. Apparently I'm in the wrong racket.
That's pathetic, hopefully they go out of business soon. Just think of all the filiment that could have been made instead of e waste
Get a Brother laserjet.
I was highly considering a Brother, now I definitely will get one.
I've had two in the span of about 16 years. Only reason I got a new one was because I couldn't find decent drivers for it for Windows 8. Considering with HP and Epson inkjets they wouldn't even last 2 years, 8+ years is a good deal. Brother printers are excellent.
I've had my brother for 11 years, still going strong
I'm at five years for ours. We used the included 'teaser' toner cartridge for almost three years. After the first year, it warned us the toner was low. We laughed and turned the warning off and it just continued to provide toner for nearly another two years.
We now have an "extra large" toner cartridge. Like owning a parrot, my wife and I expect it'll outlast both of us and our children or grandchildren will get stuck with it. We're both 35.
I got a huge office printing center thing from government liquidation out of my nearby military base for $55. It came with more toner than I could ever use in my lifetime.
Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.
Holy shit, .15 euros per page? Why not just run to der Kinkos? I havenโt checked but I imagine itโs cheaper there. I get the convenience of having a printer at home but this is like if every cup of coffee you make at home cost you the Starbucks $8.25.
Or just don't buy HP.
The correct answer, as usual, is: don't buy HP.
In the US, if you print ~52(+) B&W pages a year, HP Instant Spyware is seemingly cheaper.
FedEx Kinkoโs:
Non-EU- lett Packard:
For color, HPโs cheaper once you print two pages a month.
Printing is a good excuse to walk to the local print shop. Letโs say, though, you have to drive your Honda Civic a couple miles through Los Angeles - that adds roughly thirty cents of fuel (ignoring other vehicle costs). (Thatโs our bestselling car in our second largest city, because you wouldnโt give up your parking spot in NYC.)
Conventional wisdom is to buy a Brother laser printer, but thereโs a bit of upfront cost for the color models, which are a little larger when comparing versions with scanners to inkjet all-in-ones. Who wants to do the math on those :)
โฆwhoh they have their own subscription!
Anyway I think this is more like having a printing-press-barista in your closet instead of going to the print-barista down the street. It could be anywhere from 76 cents more expensive to $5.80 less expensive a month. Compare to a Mr. Coffee which youโll pay off right away by skipping Starbucks.
tl;dr let HP siphon your data, whatโs the worst that could happen? ๐
My thing isโฆthey can dictate how much you use YOUR OWN PRINTER??? Likeโฆhow? Why? What.
Likeโฆ
$8.25 for a Starbucks? Man, it's like ยฃ3.55-ยฃ4 here in UK.
The cheapest plan 0.099 Cents for each page 10 pages in the month. 1500 pages per month 54.99 โฌ respectively.
Yeah, depending on where you live, it may be cheaper to go to your local printer shop. Plus minus cost of transport and your time.
I did not check HP's prices to Poland. Table lists 100 pages as 0.07EUR/page. Krakow, Poland, nearby printer shop takes ~0.02-0.07EUR per A4 page, and there is no subscription. Nor doing 100 pages.
Jesus fuckin Christ I was today years old when I learned about HP Instant Ink. Good gracious what a scam
The whole company is a scam. I've seen a couple of big companies get nice bulk discount contracts.
$1600 off of laptop workstations. Who the fuck can afford a bulk discount of 50%?
I don't think they even used HP printers.
While I do agree that HP is a very scummy + awful company, their pricing system is not worse than that of many other companies. Many many companies use an inflated listed price system in combination with very large discounts, often fixed discounts per customer.
There's several benefits to this. One of the biggest is that it allows their vendors to give nice "discounts" to entice ignorant customers. Ignorant people are more likely to buy a $2000 computer with 50% discount than a $1000 with 0% discount. And occasionally someone will come along and be scammed out of paying full listed price.
Inflating the list price is just very common and 50% is not even one of the worst offenders, just look at American health insurance prices for a much more egregious example. Construction building suppliers also systematically use it and "discounts" of 40 to 70% are common.
The big companies like that get the laptops at cost because they sign up for juicy support contracts, which is where the real money is
I used instant ink when I was living temporarily in Vancouver. It was actually worth the price back then. Now? Forget it.
Brother printer gang printing with their tears of joy.
I got a Brother with the big chonker carts, I usually only print once every 5-6 months and I'm still g2g like 5-6 years in.
I gotta run a cleaning cycle each time usually but that's perfectly understandable haha.
Here too, just don't update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
What !! Really? That's sad
Easy. Never buy HP. Their printers are shit and so are their laptops.
What's wrong with their laptops? I've never had any issues.
Their consumer line has very poor build quality. Cheap everything. All of the plastic is flimsy and breaks easily, inadequate cooling, etc. They're built about as good as Acer, but at a price that you'd expect from a much, much better brand.
Then there's how dedicated they are to screwing you. I won't touch them again for any reason after how malicious they were with the nVidia failures.
It amazes me that there are so many people who buy a printer, are offered this "pay $x a month for Y pages" type of plan, and say yes. I mean, sure, HP sucks, but they wouldn't be able to get away with such slimy business practices if there weren't so many people willing to pay.
I am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it's a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don't want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it's a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don't care if it's a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it's easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.
Breaking news: Printer company behaves like printer companies always have. User hostile.
This just in: Capitalism works
So the plan dictates how many pages you can print each month? Feck no! I own a Brother laser printer and Iโm so glad I escaped the HP madness years ago.
Yes and no. If you exceed that, I think they just bill you for the next tier.
If you cancel, they immediately remote disable the perfectly working cartridges already in your printer that are still full of ink. Even if you've fully paid for the remainder of the month.
It's a complete scam. Just don't buy an HP printer, Instant Ink or not.
Of course they disable the cartridge. You're paying for ink on a subscription. If you didn't pay for cart in full, why should you be able to use the rest of it? That's literally what you signed up for. Otherwise everyone would get a full cartridge for $1.
If you don't want to do ink-cart-layaway, don't sign up and buy the cartridge.
Disabling mid-month is a scam though.
hahahaa i recently dumped them for a big, sturdy, traditional, offline Brother laser. it's ridiculous how much more satisfying it is to print, especially without HP breathing over your shoulder counting how many pages you've printed in the last billing period
Satisfying isn't the word. We have to generally use HP for SAP purposes so unfortunately I have to buy HP for work. Guess what? Every fucking month a few clients need printer support. Just HP bullshit time and time again..
I have brothers, kyoceras and others that just work and work without any issues. But HPs are just nagging offline fucking pains in the ass.
Just making it easier not to buy one!
"buy"
Being boycotting this shitstain company since Carly Fiorina turned it into a perfect example of peak 1990's MBA management style (the kind that killed companies like GE) and, once again, I get to pat myself on the back for it.
Almost 20 years of regular smug self-satisfaction for free is a pretty good investment.
Any reliable recommendations for ink jets, in that case?
If you still own a HP printer, it's your own fault. Sorry. Got an Canon with liquid refill, loved it, equipped my company with it & recommended it to everyone I know. It's not even expensive & the quality is impeccable. Plus: no problems whatsoever over Linux.
EDIT: CANON, not Epson. I'm distracted sometimes. Canon PIXMA G4511, sub 300 Eur.
Wait till you find out it purges the lines every print, and while you can replace the purge sponge, the system doesnโt always have a โreset the purge spongeโ option. And the ones that do use a rather unknown button combination that may or may not work.
Ink subscription is a bad descriptor
You pay per page, if you have extra ink leftover then you donโt have access to it
Isn't that worse? It's hard to say at these levels of corporate nastiness but I was surprised they could go lower
Yes, the ink subscription is their corporate speak
If like me you don't print much but still need a printer occasionally, get a laser printer (possibly a scanner multifunction, since it can be handy to scan your receipts), and just buy your cartridges normally. Laser toner won't dry up like ink does, so you end up paying less for your infrequent prints in the long run.
At this point, I am positive the HP printer marketing department, have lost their collective minds.
Most marketing departments are removed, but this seems to be a new level of dumb. Bricking printers, blocking 3rd party, messing with firmware, price gouging..
Brother are simple, reliable, low cost and dependable. Every one I have used in commercial or watched in home use have been straight up boss. I don't own one, but it will be my next printer when the Epson runs out of ink, mark my words!
They do it because they can get away with it. Zero consequences, and they still have a legion of customers who are happy to piss their money down the drain on egregiously overpriced ink.
I totally agree with you: Brother laser printers all the way.
As a satisfied owner of a Brother laser printer, I can safely say I would never want anything else.
I'm so glad I just happened to get a Brother. It was the cheapest one that had the features I wanted (that wasn't from a completely unknown brand) and it wasn't an HP. I've been nothing but happy with mine and seeing all the love Brother printers get it feels like I totally lucked out.
People keep buying them and signing up for an ink subscription. If people are that dumb, they'd be insane NOT to milk them for cash
This. Just like Apple users.
Wow, what a scam!
Seriously, fuck HP.
HP actually has a brilliant business strategy.
voila, you have like 3 people left who you can charge infinite money for a lump of shit. Infinite profit margins
You know why all of the printer companies are so shitty? It's because they're in the business of selling printers. That's why they break and cost so much to maintain. You know why the sewing machine company sells printers that work? Because they accidentally let some of their sewing machine engineers make printers.
Yeah, until the printer engineers took over from the sewing machine engineers in around 2020. Even Brother is evil now, rolling out firmware updates that render third party toner useless or do even more evil shenanigans via firmware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I don't think there's a good brand left these days, Brother was the last bastion of "not shitty" and now they, too, were enshittified.
I've seen a lot of recommendations for Brother, I want to add one for Ricoh.
I bought a B/W laser printer from Ricoh (213w IIRC) a decade ago for under 40 bucks and a new generic, no-name Amazon toner refill for 25 like 5 years ago. Printed thousands of pages, just sitting in a corner under the stairs.
Bonus: it uses Wi-Fi (so anyone in the house can print) and is compatible with generic PCL drivers in Linux.
Thanks for the advice I am going to see if I can find one
I think they don't make the home printers anymore.
That sucks, but maybe second-hand can be found, even cheaper.
The only thing that still might save printers is competition.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn't pull all this HP shit? They even have label printers which allow third party labels.
There are inkjet printers now from multiple other brands which are great too and allow full refills.
Just don't buy HP it's that easy.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn't pull all this HP shit?
You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates outright blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Now, that even Brother has turned to the dark side, I really don't know what printer to recommend other than older/used Brothers with firmware updates disabled.
With all the Big Brains at HP making up all this atrocious bullshit you'd think one of them would say "why don't we buy all the competition like the large media companies are doing? It's not like the US will stop us, hell they'll give us subsidies or something."
I will never buy or recommend HP printers ever again. If you need a general printer, Brother all the way now.
Are these posts about HP just a way for Brother to advertise in the comment section
I mean I'm definitely cancelling my HP subscription, but still. It's a lot.
No. It's like bitwarden. Everyone's praising them to shill levels because they are generally that good. Brothers just run and run without nagging or insane prices. They do tend to be a little more expensive because they don't lose money on the hardware like HP or cannon will.
Perfect analogy. I completely shill for both Bitwarden and Brother printers because they legit are just that good. When I find products like that they're what I push to my family and friends because they "just work."
Not advertising but I did buy a brother laser maybe two years ago for home. I rarely need color, if I need something stunning Iโll send it to Office Depot and pay .50 each. Thatโs maybe two time a year. $20 a year for an off brand toner cartridge otherwise.
LOL, if not, Brother's marketing should lean into it. I got an old HP laser that cranks 1,000+ pages for $20. I'll run the wheels off it and buy a Brother.
HP is coasting on goodwill from us old folks who remember when they were the best of best.
I think itโs just wave after wave of people who are shocked to discover what a horrible mess HP printers are. Some of us learned it many years ago.
If it helps even it out for you - I'm quite happy with my Epson lol
I hate to /HailCorporate but it was affordable, takes cheap unbranded ink, and hasn't given me much trouble (I don't use it often, so the ink heads do dry, but a couple of cycles of head cleaning and they're good to go again).
I'll shill for brother because it's cheap, they don't lock out generic cartridges, prints well on the network from Linux, and seem to last.
What they are missing on compared to HP is parts support. However, the comparable HP printer with parts support is twice the price and the parts are almost the cost of a new cheap printer.
Lexmark is okay too, I guess.
Who the fuck keep buying HP in 2023 when there are lots of other brands available in the market?
companies and uninformed people who fall for the "recommendations" at the store.
Corps.
I've heard their business-oriented products are much much better. Which makes sense, because business customers tend to have contracts that cost the supplier money when things don't work, whereas pissing off consumers usually costs nothing in the short term.
Go into a store like Walmart and you will have 6 different HP printers, 1 epson, and empty spots where the 1 Lexmark sits. Once you get to rural areas you donโt have much of an option to specially when the point of purchase already limits your purchase options.
Most people will not drive 1-2+ hours to get more options.
The number of papers that subscribers are allowed to print...
hahaha
It's literally cheaper for me to drive to a local printing shop, pay for parking, and drive back, than buy one of these dogshit HP printers, and then get scammed by their ink cartridges
This is yet another reason why I would not buy or recommend HP printers anymore. My ancient laserjet from 10 years ago is still going strong, but if it ever kicks the bucket, I'm getting a Brother. They seem to just work without any hassle.
HP selling hardware with digital blackmail fees
My brother laser jet still happily prints.
the way you phrase it I thought your brother is a laser jet lol
Don't be silly. The laser jet ain't my brother. That's reserved for Brother P-Touch โค๏ธโค๏ธ
Do not update its firmware and disable auto-updates:
Subscription-based hardware business models, or anything that is cloud-based have a strong tendency to do this. They sucker you into buying their hardware with rock bottom prices and reasonable subscription fees and slowly they increase the prices and put more and more features and functionalities behind increasing paywalls.
Never buy anything that you don't fully own after paying for it.
I am guessing people aren't printing as much as they used to and the prices will just go up eventually.
Also, fuck printers, and HP specifically.
Cannon has gotten so bad, that I can't remember what printer brand I hated before them. I am pretty sure it was cannon though.
too bad. they used to be petty good
I hate hearing that about Canon. Iโve always been a big fan and they used to be the reasonable ones. Of course my printer is a bit older, to the extent that itโs not supported in Windows 11 (itโs easier to print Windows documents from Linux or my iPhone), and itโs off my list for any future printers
Oh Brother, where art thou?
Yeah, I had a Canon BW laser printer that has chugged along and gave no complaints with a toner cartridge I paid $20 for a 3-pack. Another family member has inherited it but hearing the fact they are stepping up their DRM leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
We solved printing decades ago. Whatโs the need to constantly add more complexity in pricing? Itโs not like there were major breakthroughs in technology or something. Printing is printing.
We've had some major breakthroughs in gouging and selling things as a service at exorbitant rates.
We've had some major breakthroughs in regulatory capture of the FTC.
Maybe you should think a little more about the shareholders and little less about yourself. /s
It's called capitalism, and it relies on constant and infinite growth, which is impossible, but that's not going to stop those making all the money from trying (until the whole thing collapses on us all while they hide out in their bunker).
*aas run amok.
The cheapest plan is .10 euro a month per page if you only print 10 pages. (.99 euro, max 10 pages). Just pay a library or kinkos at that point!
they charge you PER PAGE??!
No, you get billed X euro per month, which gives you the "right" to print up to X pages each month. Even worse.
in the year of our lord below 2023, it is so easy to just go to a print shop the 0.5 times per year you have to print something
omg, fuck these guys
Good, HP finally running their printer businesses into the ground. Paperless or bust.
/Shocked pickachu face.
Get 'em hooked, make 'em pay.
Laughs in Epson Ecotank
laughs in off-brand toner sitting in my Brother
Laughs in BizHub color laser copier that fell off a truck
God, the amount of times I've had to explain the EcoTank vs HP math to customers in my store, and then STILL have them pick an HP is fucking baffling.
Until the software counter decides that the waste ink pad is full and the thing blows a software fuse.
Epson's official solution to a full pad is to throw out your printer and buy a new one - literally a printer with a self destruct timer. Not very "eco".
dell
brother
I pity the fool that doesn't listen to the Hulkster.
HP is like the facebook of printers. Hugely popular; absolute shit product.
Anything corporations think you can't do without will be raised until enough people have no choice but to stop buying them, then they'll hold it there.
I actually have a HP printer with instant ink. When it first launched it was great, there was a "free" tier that was like up to 10 pages free per month.
I don't print a lot but like having a printer for the odd job so that was ideal for me. Now and again a new ink cartridge would arrive and I just didn't think about it.
But they took away the free tier, so I've been on that ยฃ0.99 plan which is like 15 pages a month. I put up with it because it was convenient enough to not have to worry about ink, but I was still pissed off at the rug pull.
If they do raise the price in the UK, I'll just sell the printer and buy a new one that does super cheap ink.
Any recommendations out there?
Inkjet is pretty much terrible for anyone printing very little (more ink wasted on cleaning cycles than actually printing, high chance that the ink dries up regardless) and very much (stupidly expensive and unreliable).
If you don't need color, get a cheap b/w laser printer. Brother used to be one of the last good ones until they, too, decided to block third party cartridges via firmware updates last year.
If you can get an old, used, Brother laser printer for cheap, go for it - they were borderline indestructible and would print with any cheap toner.
I have two Epson ecotank printers, one at home and one for small business. Not cheap, but the ink that comes with the printer lasts for years. That is at 30 pages a month or so. Avoid all inkjet printers with replaceable ink cartridges.
If you don't really need color, just buy a laser printer.
if you need color, the epson ecotank line is great. they do also have a counter that stops the entire printer after around 18000 pages, but it can be reset with 3rd party software and a 10$ software key. the purge tank for cleaning the nozzle fills up, so just take it out, wash the sponge and reset the counter. idk if newer models still have that counter.
If you live in or near a city, taking a USB stick with the docs to print to a print shop is probably the best option if you print very little - you even just "print to PDF" at home and take only that file to have the flexibility to print just the stuff you want the way you want it.
Unfortunately that is not a workable solution to me, but I appreciate that it's the best idea for most.
I'm in the same boat. I lost the free plan because we had to print a lot more during homeschooling that made sense to go up a couple of tiers for a month. Been on the ยฃ0.99 tier since. Didn't mind it because we do still use it occasionally and one time the nozzels on cart dried up and it got replaced at HP's expense.
So I don't hate instant ink, but only at it's current price. If it gets jacked up I'll probably just buy ordinary carts and take my chances on it clogging again. I can still nip into the office if I need a one off print, this one is just convenient.
Edit: it's ยฃ1.49
Epson Eco tank to F HP's bullshit in the A.
I got one during Black Friday years ago and it came with so much extra ink that I still haven't bought more ink for it ๐
HP taking business ideas from Elon I see.
โThe beatings will continue until moral improvesโ
After 15 years of having to buy a new ink printer almost every year. We just bought an entry level laser printer. Same printer for 20 years now. Never even changed the toner yet. Was a huge upfront cost of 500$ compared to the 100$ ink jets, but man is it ever nice to just completely forget your printer exists until you hit the print button, grab your document, then go back to completely forgetting you own a printer. Never have to put any thought or effort into it. Just sits there always being ready and fully functional.
When we do have to change the toner, the exact same standardized cartridges are still the ones they use on the new ones, so they will be around when we need them.
I fortunately only did a inkjets for 3-4 years before I went laser. I even bought a second toner cartridge at the same time! 15 years later, I actually used the 2nd cartridge-the printer is still going (albeit it seems it may only last another 5-10 years).
the article sorta implies that only 'hp+' denies use of third-party cartridges for life of the printer.. but just plain 'instant ink' subs do, too, through mandatory automatic firmware updates to the printer that will immediately install a firmware update with 'dynamic security' that blocks all but 'genuine' oem cartridges.
Good. Stop printing.
I use Instant Ink in the US, and I haven't received an email about a price increase.
I know no one wants to hear this, based on past experience, but I'll say it anyway: The plan has worked fine for us. Our ink costs went from $60-$80/year to $12. The printer works fine, too; we've not had any problems with it. Obviously we don't print a ton, but we do print enough that we want to have a printer. If we did print a ton of stuff, I'd definitely go a different direction than Instant Ink, but for our light use, it works fine.
If you were paying $60/year to print, I'd say you were printing a lot.
That's as much as I ever paid for a printer. I have two currently, a BW laser and a color. Paid $50 for the color used...its 2 years old.
Just can't see wasting money on inkjets with their issues, and I've had many. First was a 1992 HP Bubble jet, which worked great for the time, but died before it ran out of ink.
You can pry my EcoTank from my cold, dead hands.