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> The ink is only valid during your subscription period, like most other subscriptions.

Name one other subscription service that sends you physical stuff every month that they remotely disable all of when you cancel.

My milk subscription will come and pick up the delivery box if I cancel. And the milk will expire by the end of the month.

My trash service will come and pick up the cans when I cancel service.

Do you get a new delivery box every month, and a new trash can every month, and get to keep all of the old ones indefinitely, but then have to return them all at once if you cancel? Does your milk normally not expire at all, but suddenly all expire at once when you stop getting more?

If it were the same they'd come and get the delivery box and superglue the caps on any already delivered bottles of milk in your fridge.

I’m not sure I see the relevance. I’m paying for a printing service, when I stop paying, I stop getting a printing service.

The fact that there’s physical ink cartridges involved is neither here-nor-there. It’s a practical requirement, nothing else.

Rental cars these days will disable themselves if you don’t return at the of the rental. The SIM card in your phone stops working when the subscription ends etc etc. There are plenty of services involving physical assets that stop working when you stop paying.

Also how much printing do you do? I get an ink cartridge maybe once a year.

If I pay for a subscription for e.g. food delivery, I get something delivered every n days. If I stop paying, they don't come back and steal all the previously delivered but unused parts either.

What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

With my SIM card, that's actually the case, too: It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.

If you pay for a subscription to Audible and accrue monthly credits, they will steal the unused ones back when you cancel the subscription.

Not making a judgement either way, just adding more data.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Obviously not. You’ve paid for food delivery, you got what you paid for, why would they take it back? It’s not like you’re paying for cooked meals.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Have you ever read or tried to signup for the service? Literally everything is priced per page. A no point do they say you’re getting a subscription ink service, it’s quite explicitly a per page printing service.

I’m sorry, but you bought a service that clearly sold and priced as “$X per month for Y printed pages”, and misinterpret that as “$X per month, for Y ink”, then that’s on you.

Personally, I'd recommend just nuking HP from orbit until it's gone.

Printers, and their manufacturers sucks, and HP is the worst of the bunch. No one should ever even try to defend them, there is nothing defensible about them.

Especially considering you can now buy printers that only ever work with instant ink and reject all other cartridges.

(Btw, I'm using a modded brother printer)

I'm all for that, but only if we can also nuke all HP Printers crowding the 5GHz spectrum with their "HP JetDirect" 5Ghz APs. My neighbor has one, and I swear that useless HP printer AP is louder than my wifi router in many parts of my house. I will never, ever buy an HP printer because of that.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Where does that expectation come from, exactly? The name?

The pricing page is clearly and explicitly all about pages per month [1].

> It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.

So you're comparing a different type of plan here.

Prepaid mobile plans like this are akin to Amazon's "subscribe and save" program: they'll charge and send you a cartridge on whatever frequency you like, regardless of usage. Choose too frequent and you'll amass as huge stockpile; too infrequent and you'll run out of ink.

Instant Ink is like 'regular' mobile plans: you get x GB per month for a certain price. If you cancel your plan, even though you only used 5% of your data for that month, you don't get to continue your plan.

HP's FAQ even say this [2]:

> If you decide to cancel your HP Instant Ink, you can go back to using HP original Standard or XL cartridges. HP Instant Ink cartridges will not work after the end of the current billing cycle in which you cancel. To continue printing after your billing cycle ends, make sure you have standard replacement ink cartridges ready to use in your printer.

The alternative to all this is to just buy regular cartridges as you need them.

[1] https://instantink.hpconnected.com/sg/en/l/v2?jumpid=af_e1d0...

[2] https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/instant-ink/faq.html#:~:te...

They don't send you stuff every month. You pay a fixed monthly price for a certain number of pages of whatever color/quality you want along with some page count rollover benefits. You no longer buy cartridges. The printer phones home when the cartridge runs low (well before that based on their proprietary predictive algorithm) and a new one arrives soon thereafter automatically. It's not like you have more than 1-2 cartridges at a time. And you never pay for them in any case.

Incidentally you can still install standard (non-subscription tied - e.g. bought at Costco) cartridges and the subscription status is then irrelevant (but of course you pay for those cartridges so they're yours to do with as you please unlike the rented subscription ones), but that's not the point (for the most part).

I find it handy for super low volume printing needs at home.

> The ink is only valid...

The ink is what?

You're paying $1 for 10 pages of printing a month. Stop paying, no printing. (They have larger plans, too, but if you're printing 50 pages a month, I'd bet the regular cartridges work well and don't dry up).

Don't want to pay for subscription ink? No problem, get the regular ink. Have some account problem and can't pay for subscription ink, you can still get regular ink and use that (subject to the usual inkjet printer woes that come with not printing much).

Seems like leasing a car and complaining you're expected to return it after the lease.

> Seems like leasing a car and complaining you're expected to return it after the lease.

If instead of giving the car back so they can resell it, you had to crush it or replace the engine oil with sodium silicate, then you'd be absolutely right to complain. Useful things should never intentionally be forced to become waste just to protect a business model.

Hear hear.

All the while, we as individuals are pushed harder and harder to be more efficient, more environmentally conscious and less wasteful.

How about super markets stop selling peeled oranges in plastic packaging?

> How about super markets stop selling peeled oranges in plastic packaging?

Wow that's actually a thing in the US... mind blown

I only recall seeing them in cans, but plastic wouldn't surprise me.

Not sure about the US, I'm in the UK, but yes, it does actually happen in some supermarkets here.

We the voters need to make those requirements by law

HP provide a free ink return and recycling service. Nobody is forcing you waste the ink, you wanna see it reused, send it back!

HP also use much larger capacity cartridges for this services. So under normal circumstances there’s less ink and fewer wasted hunks of plastic floating around. Not sure how you provide this service if signing up for one month got a years worth of ink, and no obligation to pay anymore.

It's also wasteful to have to send a perfectly good cartridge back and then go pick up a new one. And if HP knows how to make better, larger capacity ink cartridges, what reason other than greed could there be to limit them to their predatory subscription program?

> I don't expect ink cartridges to work after a month or two if I haven't printed anything, either.

I have a Deskjet 4515 for a decade or so. I use regular ink cartridges with it, and even if I don't print anything for three months, it just prints fine. Sometimes a couple of nozzles get clogged, but printing or a quick clean restores them to perfect order. When you're printing in "Normal" quality, these clogs are tolerated somehow, so you don't see the degradation in the quality either.

Modern HP printers came a very long way since 500C/550C days. These are resilient machines now, even if they're made to home-duty level of robustness.

HP may have many quirks and unethical practices around ink, but ink quality and machine resilience are not two of them.

What you are not telling is that TCO for HP printer is an order of magnitude higher than a laser printer from Brother.

Well considering all the HP printers I gave away sans one were working perfectly, and it worked with any OS I ever used, I'll pay the difference in terms of reliability and experience.

The first one was given away because I got a Canon bubblejet for free, and that was really unreliable and expensive.

I got my second HP with my money, and gave it away for a HP scanner/printer combo which again I got free with a laptop purchase.

The one I broke was this combo, which was worn away in a decade. I probably used it beyond its designated life, and it was a bottom of the barrel machine.

Then, I got the 4515 I'm using now, with my own money, again.

I'd have said the same thing for Samsung lasers, but they have stopped making them. I'm hoarding some spares for mine. These things are also built like tanks. They were jointly built with Xerox, so they were something.

I'm not a person who replaces all IT equipment every year, and I'll accept a higher TCO if I can keep the machine for a longer time, and can buy its spares for a considerable amount of time. Also, as a person who mingled with inks and printers for a long time, I'd not buy off-brand ink for my devices. It just doesn't worth it.

P.S.: I don't like color lasers for printing out documents I plan to work on, because the triple-baking process makes the paper shiny, and the paper becomes less than ideal to take notes or markup. A B&W laser is perfect for papers and other stuff, and inkjet is perfect for color documents which I want to read and work-on. Plus it's a decent quality photo printer, too. I take photos and printing them and gifting them is great. People love it.

> I'd have said the same thing for Samsung lasers, but they have stopped making them.

I got fed up with overpriced HP ink cartridges that clog up; so I paid about £120 for a Samsung mono laser (I hardly ever need colour, and if I do I can walk to a local print-shop with a memory stick).

A couple of months later I discovered that Samsung's printer division had been borged by HP. Happily, toner is reasonably priced, and 5 years on the machine works fine. If it ever breaks I'll just chuck it in the skip - I'm not going to tangle with HP support.

Actually, Samsung sold the division since it is not their core business anymore. You may only need rollers and a new imaging unit down the line if yours has a replaceable drum.

Please don't override drum over-use protection, because it also holds the waste toner unit. If it explodes, your machine is done.

I have a spare drum unit and plan to buy three more large toners for mine, so I can use it for 7-8 years more at least. Then we'll see what happens.

The machine I bought takes toner cartridges with an integrated drum. The only consumable is cartridges.

The cartridge that came with it seems to have been less than a quarter full; it lasted a few months. Since then, the full replacement cartridge is still going strong.

Looks like it's like my first one. I have an MD series one (home-office class). Which has 3000 page cartridges and 9000 page drum.

The upside is, everything inside it can be changed, incl. rollers, so as long as I have spares for it, it'll live on. Mine also supports AirPrint, so anyone can print from anything (Android has an app/driver for it, too).