I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
If you need a inkjet printer buy one with an ink tank. Like Epson’s EcoTank line. Much cheaper in the long run, since 3rd party refill bottles are super cheap.
I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I'm riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.
It's worse than it sounds... You're not actually paying for ink, you're paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped "free" when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you're ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it'll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you're a member of the residual income brigade...
I have a canon ink tank printer and haven’t had to refill the ink tanks in 3 years. I don’t even know where they are. I print a lot of knitting patterns and workbook type stuff, but not often. Still, when I do use the printer, I use quite a bit of ink. I’ve been really happy with it! I think most printers with ink tanks are going to be a good bet, but I have never seen an HP printer function correctly after the first print or two. I won’t pay them any attention, let alone buy an HP printer. I’m convinced HP is single-handedly why printers have such a bad reputation.
Laser printers. HP has been trash forever. I honestly look down on people who still buy inkjet printers. It shows they have no ability to think about future costs.
If the printer costs less than or barely more than an in cartridge, it's a scam. If you want a non scam printer, it will be more expensive. And never buy HP.
I mean that's a really shitty thing for the environment, but I thought when you sign up for their ink subscription, you authorized them to lock any remaining ink if you ever cancel. The reasoning is probably to discourage people from cancelling right after getting a new cartridge and being able to use a full cartridge of ink. Might be unethical, but not illegal.
If the business model doesn’t allow them to have those situations written off as a loss leader then they need to reevaluate the business model.
The vast majority of the people should forget to cancel and the cost should be enough for you to manage, for some of your customers to get amazing Utility from your service, and for most of your customers to consider your service so valuable they couldn’t think to get rid of it, even if they don’t utilize it fully.
Disney offers meal plans with your vacation. Most people don’t use all the benefit, some people do, and even less people manage to eat at all the most expensive and prestigious places for their meals because they knew how to utilize their benefits to their maximum potential.
Same with game pass, Amazon prime, and basically any prepaid service. The whole thing is balanced to be enticing, convenient, and potentially a massive value prospect to keep people in that golden spot of FOMO so they buy in and not cancel, but not such a great value that you cannibalize your other monetization streams.
Here they made it apparent that it’s not a good value, there is no situation where i can come out on top, so instead of losing on my monthly sub, they also lost unit sales and any good memories and associations I had with their products and services in the past.
There are plenty of things that aren’t illegal but are counter to your intended goals.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text, you caught me with lots to say I guess.
That's a good way of putting it, and it says a lot that they would happily take a loss if it means that there's no chance you could get an edge over them.
This is why I am hesitant to buy a printer, I‘m still using a 10+y old laser printer. Only thing I miss is printing from Wifi, but hey, I‘d rather dig this thing out of the closet and connect with USB each time than be forced to make an account.
There are printer ink subscriptions? And here I thought, ink printers couldn't get more annoying (dried out every time I wanted to print, cartridges costing as much as the printer itself).