The monthly ink deals that come with a catch: Now HP is disabling printer cartridges over the internet if you cancel your subscription

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Frozen out: HP customers who paid for the firms ink subscription service are furious after the firm disabled the ink cartridges in their machines after they quit the service

• Customers pay between 99p and £22.49 a month for HP's Instant Ink service
• The printer is permanently online so the cartridges can monitor the ink levels
• When they are running low, new ones are automatically delivered to your door
• But the firm will remotely disable the cartridges if subscription is cancelled

When Nicola Wordsworth urgently needed to print an important medical document for her elderly father, her printer wouldn't work. There was nothing wrong with it and it had a full ink cartridge inside.

It turned out the manufacturer, HP, had remotely disabled the machine because she had cancelled her ink subscription.

Nicola, 54, is one of many furious customers who have flooded social media with similar complaints.

HP's Instant Ink service is heavily promoted in high street stores to anyone buying a printer.

Customers pay between 99p and £22.49 a month depending on how many pages they need to print.

The cartridges monitor ink levels and when they are running low new ones are delivered. HP claims the service is up to 70 per cent cheaper than buying standard cartridges.

Epson and Brother offer similar services but HP's is by far the most popular, with around ten million subscribers worldwide. Subscriptions soared over lockdown.

But there's a catch that is rarely made clear to customers: if you cancel your subscription, your cartridges will be remotely disabled — even if they still contain ink.

When Money Mail visited a London branch of Currys, we discovered that none of the promotional leaflets and posters mention this. It is not explained in the cancellation section of the small print either — but buried in an 8,000-word terms and conditions document.

The one-line mention states: 'When your service is cancelled for any reason, HP will remotely disable the subscription cartridges and you will no longer be able to print with [them].'

Automatic refills: HP customers pay between 99p and £22.49 a month for the company's Instant Ink service depending on how many pages they need to print

Nicola, from Kent, subscribed when she bought her printer five years ago, paying around £1.99 a month.

But when she gave the printer to her 83-year-old father she cancelled it, as he would only need it occasionally. She had no idea this meant the printer would stop working.

'There was lots of ink still in the cartridge,' says Nicola, who runs eco-friendly dog products business Pup Suds.

'It's my printer — I bought it and own it — and I paid for that cartridge, yet I was blocked from using it because I wasn't paying an ongoing fee.'

In the end Nicola resubscribed in order to print the medical document. 'I feel cheated to be honest,' she says.

'Now I'm signed into a subscription for something I don't need, just because I wanted to print out one thing — and I can't cancel in case my dad needs to print something in future.'

HP says customers will be able to use their printer again if they purchase a regular cartridge.

But this was not the case for photographer Aina Gomez, 38, who says her printer wouldn't connect to her new wifi connection after she moved house.

It was otherwise fully functional and contained an ink cartridge, but wouldn't work even when she tried regular HP cartridges. And despite paying £3.59 a month, customer services have not been able to resolve the problem.

'I'm going to have to throw it in the bin because no one can use it,' she says. 'It's only two years old and a terrible waste.'

An HP spokesman says: 'Cartridges delivered as part of an Instant Ink subscription will only work while a printer is enrolled in the HP Instant Ink service.

'If the subscription has been cancelled, customers can continue to use their printer with standard cartridges and return their Instant Ink supplies for recycling.'


Printers being remotely disabled if customer cancels ink subscription | This is Money

 

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HP’s Ink Subscription Has DRM That Disables Your Printer Cartridges

Printer ink is expensive. HP promises to help with a subscription service for ink, complete with cartridges that stop working when you cancel your subscription. But HP makes you count pages, and I’d rather print as much as I want

HP’s Ink Subscription Service Sounded Like a Good Deal
In mid-2016 I was running into a recurring issue. I was always out of printer ink, and new cartridges were expensive. Laser printers can be cheaper for many people, but my household does print as many color photos as it does text documents, which means they’re not a good choice for me. So I purchased a new inkjet printer on the promise of HP’s easy-to-use ink subscription service. For a low cost, I would always have all the ink I needed—as long as I kept to a page limit, that is.

Now, years later, I’ve realized there was one other price of admission. The ink they’ve sent me isn’t mine; it’s theirs. And if I cancel the subscription when the billing cycle ends, the printer won’t use the ink anymore, and HP requires I send it back to them. I have to buy new ink to replace the ink that is already in my house.

HP Instant Ink is Easy to Use, and Inexpensive Up Front

As long as your HP internet-connected printer supports it, HP Instant Ink is very easy to set up. You go to their enrollment site, sign up for an account, and connect your printer. Once you finish signing up, HP will send you ink cartridges; billing begins when you install them in your printer. HP requires you to choose a plan that limits the pages you can print each month. HP doesn’t care what you print, just the pages needed for the job. A page with a single word on it and a full-color photo page are both the same as far as the plan is concerned. If you don’t use all your allotted pages in the month, the extra pages roll-over and you can use them next month.

How much you pay depends on the number of pages you can print and roll-over. HP offers a free plan with 15 pages per month, but no roll-over. If you go over the limit, you pay $1 for each set of 10 pages you print (meaning if you print five pages, you still pay $1). The first paid tier is $2.99 a month for 50 pages, and the ability to roll-over 100 pages from previous months. Additional pages are still $1 for a set of 10 pages. The next step up is $3.99 a month, with 100 pages per month and 200 roll-over pages. You’ll pay $1 for sets of 15 pages if you go over at this level. The top tier is $9.99 a month at 300 pages, and 600 roll-over pages. You’ll pay $1 per 20-page set if you go over this tier limit.

The Ink Stops Working if You Cancel
Here’s the kicker: if you cancel, your ink stops working. You read that right; as soon as your billing cycle ends the printer will not accept the ink anymore, and you’re required to send it back to HP. At least they provide the postage and packaging for that purpose.

HP doesn’t spell out any consequences in their terms of service for failure to send the ink back, so we checked with a support agent. They helpfully explained that nothing happens if you fail to send them back, but the cartridges would stop working. You’ll have to buy more ink on your own if you want to keep printing. HP ships specially marked ink as part of this process, and your printer recognizes that it is intended for Instant Ink subscribers only. It’s essentially DRM, but instead of locking down a digital movie or book, this locks down a physical product: the ink in your printer.

Instant Ink requires an internet connection for your printer. HP explains that they monitor your ink levels, so they know when to send you more, but as described in their Terms of Service the other reason for this is to remotely disable your ink cartridges if you cancel, or if there are any issues with your payment.

Those terms also give HP permission to “remotely change, patch, update, or otherwise modify your printer’s software, firmware or programming, without notice to you” to provide the Instant Ink service. HP also says it will remotely monitor your printer’s page count and ink status, as well as the “types of documents printed (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, pdf, jpeg, etc.).”

You’ll Save Money if You Print Mostly Color

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If you’re asking whether HP instant ink is a good deal, the answer is a resounding: it depends.

In a little over two and a half years, I’ve printed 1517 pages. Many of these are full-color prints for photos, labels, and so on. But this has also included a mix of regular black and white documents, too. Thanks to roll-over pages I have avoided extra charges every month except four. Three out of those four months, I printed less than ten over the limit pages; one month I printed an additional 116 pages. So while most months I paid $3 to $4, one month I paid $16 for my excessive page prints

Overall since I joined HP ink I’ve spent just under $110. Comparing that to the cost of ink, I’m doing well. Since I signed up for the program, HP shipped one black cartridge and two of each color cartridges. I’m currently sitting at less than 25% in the existing black cartridge and about 50% of the color cartridges. The exact ink HP sends isn’t for sale, but they describe it as ‘extra high capacity‘ in their FAQ. The closest equivalent I can find for my printer is High Yield cartridges. They sell a full pack (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) for $110, and a color pack for $66. So side by side, I’ve received $176 worth of ink and only paid $110. You could try to save money with third-party cartridges, but HP and other printer manufacturers have a long history of fighting their use. And HP’s legal text include lines that explain using a third-party cartridge will void the warranty.

While the pricing math is working out well for me, it may not work as well for you. HP only sends ink when you need it, so if you print far less or far more than I do, or you print just text documents, then the math changes. It’s easy to get trapped into overages, and while you can step up or down in your plan to avoid that, you have to pay attention to know when it’s necessary.

The only way to know how many pages you’ve printed is to log into HP’s website and check first. If you forget to do that and don’t keep track, you can go way over your plan. HP won’t automatically move you up to the next level either. That’s what happened to me in November: I went 100 pages over my limit and didn’t notice until the bill arrived. By that point, it was too late to step up to the next level, which would have saved me money.

Worse yet, if you need to replace your printer, you have to do it through HP, or you will lose your roll-over pages and plans. Every time I print, the first page is a blurry mess (which counts against my limit). But, unless I want to lose the ink I paid for, I have to use the “Replace a Printer” process on HP’s website.

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HP’s Ink Subscription Has DRM That Disables Your Printer Cartridges (howtogeek.com)