Subscribe to a bottomless cartridge

Photo: HP

With the HP subscription, you will pay for the number of pages you print at home, and not for the amount of ink that you use.

A home printer seems like a very simple device. But looks can be deceiving. It is, in fact, a kind of interim element in the development that leads from the Gutenberg printing press, an invention that has changed our past, to a 3D printer, an invention that is changing our future.

That is why our little printer deserves a little more attention. In other words, HP Inc. (formerly Hewlett-Packard) believes that it is actually you - the owners of these devices - that deserve more attention. 

Photo: HP

If you have one of their colour printers (although not every HP model is suitable, all the more modern ones surely are an option, if they can be connected to the Internet) at home or in the office and, at the same time, live in one of the eighteen countries on their list (from the United States to Finland, from Spain to Belgium, etc.), you can join their subscription programme, HP Instant Ink.

Once you get a subscription that works according to the life per month principle, you don’t have to worry about cartridges in your printer running out of ink and putting you in a predicament at that key moment when you only have to print out the fruits of your work. Even before you run out of ink, they send you a new supply to your chosen address.

With the HP ink subscription, it doesn’t matter if you print with colour or black cartridges. A colour page is no more expensive than a black and white one.

However, it is good to think about your printing habits in advance. If you estimate that you don’t print more than 15 pages per month, you will not have any costs at all; if you print up to 50 pages, your monthly subscription will be $2.99, for a hundred pages you will pay $4.99 per month, and for 700 pages, $19.99.

It is possible that you will not even use the entire purchased quota. The good news is that you can transfer it to the following month, but not further. How many pages you »save« for later depends on the selected package: with a free package, you can transfer 15 pages, while with the most expensive one you can save 1400 pages. 

The not so good news is that you will have extra costs if you go beyond the planned monthly quota. At HP Inc., they clearly point out that you will be charged one dollar for every ten or twenty additional pages you print; depending on your subscription package.

Many users of their service already got caught in their »fine-print« trap. If, for any reason, you forget to pay your subscription fee, the company remotely switches off your cartridge automatically, and it doesn’t give you a drop of ink more. Anyone who wants to terminate the subscription can of course do so, and buy ink supplies additionally by themselves. 

HP prints up to 15 pages per month for free, then the subscription fee increases to up to twenty dollars for 700 printed pages.

It is good to consider another rule: one printed page literally means one page. Even if there is only one word printed on it or just a dot, they will detect it and deduct it from your purchased quota.

However, one important detail is that it doesn’t matter if you print with a colour or black cartridge. A colour page is no more expensive than a black and white one. As mentioned, the monthly subscription is based solely on the number of pages you print, not on the ink you use. Your printer will notify the company in time, when they have to send you a new package. You will not have to pay either for the delivery, or the shipping of your empty cartridge.