About HP Instant Ink

HP Instant Ink is a subscription that changes what you are buying when you buy ink. Instead of paying for a cartridge and hoping it lasts, you pay a monthly fee for a number of pages, and the printer orders replacement cartridges itself when it sees the levels falling. Shipping and recycling envelopes are included in the fee. It is not a discount scheme bolted onto the old model, it is a different model: the pricing counts pages rather than coverage, so a full page of photographs costs the same as a single line of text. That one rule decides almost everything about whether the service is a bargain or a waste for you.

How the plans are priced

HP sells the service in five tiers on its US store, running from 1.79 dollars a month for up to 10 pages, through 5.49 for 50, 7.99 for 100 and 15.99 for 300, up to 31.99 a month for 700 pages. Unused pages roll into the next month, but only up to three times your monthly allowance, so a 50 page plan can bank 150 pages and no more. Print past your allowance and you buy extra pages in small blocks, quoted at 1.50 dollars for a set of 10 to 15 pages depending on the plan. Those blocks are where an underspecified plan quietly becomes expensive, and they are the reason picking the tier below your real monthly count is a false economy.

What the fee actually covers

The subscription covers the cartridges themselves, delivery, and prepaid envelopes for returning the empties. The printer has to be connected, because the ordering is triggered by the printer reporting its own ink levels back to HP rather than by you noticing a warning light. The cartridges that arrive are Instant Ink cartridges, which are not the same commercial item as the Original HP Standard or XL cartridges you buy in a shop. They are provisioned for an active subscription, and that distinction is the single most important thing to understand before signing up.

The condition most people miss

Instant Ink cartridges stop working when the subscription ends. HP states that they will not work after the end of the billing cycle in which you cancel, and that you then go back to buying standard or XL cartridges. Retailers and reviewers describe it more bluntly: BGR reports that HP disables the remaining cartridges on cancellation regardless of how much ink is left, and cites a subscriber who paid 308.46 dollars over several months before cancelling and finding the cartridges dead. Internet Ink says they deactivate immediately. The accounts differ on exactly when the shutoff lands, which is itself worth knowing, but they agree on the substance. You are renting the ink, not buying it, and any ink still in the cartridge on the day you leave is not yours to use.

Where it saves money and where it does not

The service is at its best for steady colour printing. BGR puts it at roughly 16 cents a colour page against about 20 cents at a print shop, before you count the trip. Because the plan counts pages and not coverage, photographs, marketing sheets and anything with heavy fill are where the maths tips furthest in your favour. It is at its worst for low and irregular volumes. If you print in bursts, the three times rollover cap means the quiet months do not fully fund the busy ones, and if you print a handful of black and white pages a year you will pay a monthly fee for capacity you never touch. Work out your real monthly page count from the printer's own counter before choosing a tier, not from an estimate.

What to weigh it against

There are three honest alternatives. Buying XL cartridges outright costs more per page but leaves you owning the supplies with nothing to cancel. Third party compatible cartridges are the cheapest route per page, though Internet Ink notes that compatibles typically stop working on a printer that has been through an Instant Ink subscription, so that door can close behind you. The third option changes the hardware rather than the supply: a refillable ink tank printer, such as HP's own Smart Tank line or the equivalents from Epson and Canon, front loads the cost into the machine and then prints very cheaply for years. If you are already replacing the printer, that comparison matters more than any subscription tier.

Who should choose something else

Do not subscribe if you print occasionally or unpredictably, because the monthly fee runs whether you print or not and the rollover cap will not rescue you. Do not subscribe if the printer sits somewhere with unreliable internet, since the whole mechanism depends on it reporting home. Do not subscribe if using third party cartridges is central to how you keep costs down, or if you simply want to own what you paid for and keep printing on your own terms. And if your printing is almost entirely black text, the page based pricing is working against you rather than for you, and a high yield black cartridge or a tank printer will be cheaper over any reasonable horizon.

HP Instant Ink