Have you heard of HP’s Instant Ink Delivery Enrolment scheme? If you haven’t then we will explain why you should avoid signing up to their subscription service because it doesn’t save you any extra money which they claim it does.

How to cancel HP Instant Ink?

Go to your HP Instant Ink account page. Click My Account, and then click Account Settings. Click Cancel my HP Instant Ink Subscription. Click Cancel Service to confirm your cancellation request. You will receive an email confirmation of the cancellation. Now you can save money by buying the ink cartridges as and when you need to.

What is Instant Ink by HP?

Instant Ink is basically a monthly subscription based service from HP where you pay a fee each month and HP will deliver new ink cartridges when your printer tells HP that you have run out of ink and needs replacing.

There are a lot of problems with this monthly plan price service, which are highlighted below.

Let’s look at a printer that offers HP Instant Ink service, the HP Officejet Pro 6830 e-All-in-One Printer which is the first of its kind to offer this subscription scheme in the UK.

You should always work out the cost of the ink cartridges that you purchase in comparison with HP’s new Instant Ink Subscription (which can get a bit confusing).

If you want to purchase a high capacity colour rainbow pack (that’s a complete set of high yield colour ink cartridges called the 935XL) for this HP 6830 printer it will cost you £35.31 giving you 825 pages to print in colour. So that works out to be 4.3p per page for colour printing. This is a very good money saving offer from inkntoneruk.co.uk letting you print in colour for as little as 4.3p per page. The high capacity 934XL black ink cartridges priced at a special price of £20.38 gives you 2p per page which is a reasonable offer from inkntoneruk for the HP Officejet Pro 6830 business printer.

Now let’s work out the cost of the ink cartridges if you use HP’s Instant Ink Subscription Scheme.

So what happens when you sign up for HP’s services? This Instant Ink service will take a direct debit payment each month from your bank account of a flat fee that covers a number of pages per month and these are as follows: £1.99 for printing 50 pages per month, £3.49 for 100 pages and £7.99 for printing 300 pages per month. Your HP Officejet Pro 6830 printer will monitor its own ink levels and automatically order replacement cartridges when the ink level system shows its low. The cartridges that will be sent to you won’t cost you as they come out from your monthly subscription fee.

HP claims that by using this service, you pay less for replacing your cartridges as you would normally do. Wrong! The catch here is the ‘Cost per Page’ regardless whether you print in colour or black and white. With the Instant Ink Subscription scheme, the cost therefore works out to be as follows. The £1.99 subscription therefore works out at 4p per page which is very poor as you can reduce the cost by half by buying it for 2p per page. The £3.49 subscription fee works out to be 3.5p per page, and lastly the £7.99 subscription turns out to 2.6p per page. The instant ink scheme works out to be reasonable for colour printing but it doesn’t work out with the mono printing as you will be paying a lot more to print in black and white documents.

To summarise: if you purchase the black 934XL (1000 Pages)

Inkntoneruk – Pay £20.38 and get 1000 pages
HP Instant Ink Subscription – Pay £34.90 (based on choosing monthly fee of £3.49 for 100 pages) and you printed 1000 pages.

Total Savings: £14.52 if you buy from inkntoneruk.co.uk

There are also some catches that you should be aware of that will make you change your mind before signing up for HP services.

With the Instant Ink scheme, if you go over your monthly limit e.g. if you chose 300 pages monthly subscription for £7.99 and you ended up printing much more in that month as your business required to do so then you could end up paying even higher fees, depending on the number of extra pages you have printed.

The number of pages you print is based on 5% coverage on a printed A4 paper. Here’s what 5% coverage looks like. Depending on your printing needs you can be printing 10%, 20%, 30% or 50% ink coverage which can eat away ‘the number of pages’ from your monthly subscription and you can quickly exceed your monthly limit. It’s like your call & text allowance with your mobile bill, any minutes you use outside your allowance will incur a charge just like this instant ink service, any excess number of pages you print will incur additional charges to your monthly subscription fee.

With HP instant ink scheme it doesn’t take into consideration of what colour you are printing, rather it’s done on the number of pages you print regardless of the colour. With the normal way of ordering your inks you can get more out of your printing by printing in the colours that have not run out and order colours when you need it. The general rule of replacing your cartridges is to change the cartridges when you can see a colour is becoming faint and fading away on the printed paper rather than relying on HP instant ink service.

To conclude, stick with purchasing your ink cartridges from retailers rather than signing up to the monthly instant ink scheme offered by HP. And if you stick with inkntoneruk.co.uk you will:

Receive your ink instantly by ordering it quickly with our easy re-order system and the cartridges will be delivered to you for free.

Take originals out of the equations and get your ink cartridges refilled which works out to be much cheaper than the original manufacturer’s cartridges and even more cost effective than instant ink service.

Buy compatible ink cartridges which is a lot cheaper than instant ink service and is very popular amongst consumers due to their good value for money and product.

Remember when you are purchasing a HP printer don’t fall into the trap of agreeing to use their subscription based services as you will be paying more for your ink cartridges. It makes more sense to shop around for the best deals especially at inkntoneruk as our prices can drop on a regular basis unlike HP Instant Ink Delivery Service where their fees stays the same each month and you end up paying much more for your ink by opting for this service.

For affordable printer supplies for personal, home and business use, check out our money-saving ink cartridges and toner cartridges.