HP's plan also drops prices when you subscribe to more pages.

$1/month -> 10 pages $4/month -> 50 pages $6/month -> 100 pages $12/month -> 300 pages $25/month -> 700 pages

In my mind, the value for the consumer is at the lower prices, where it's nice to have a printer for a few pages a month, but you know the ink is going to dry in the cartridge before you use it. I'd think HP's program will send you a new cartridge when you need it in that case, but I don't know. At higher volumes, it's probably less expensive to buy cartridges as needed, unless all your prints are full page coverage. But then ink jet has a weird niche; it's cheap, but it's worse for low volume printing because the ink can dry and foul the machine, and it's worse at high volume because the print speed isn't near laser (or highvolume impact!) and the supplies are expensive. It's great if you print a few pages a week to a few pages a day. Warm up time can be better or worse, depending on how long it takes to squirt all the ink into the sponge before it prints.

From what I can tell I can't find anything like that near me.

I justified buying a brother laser printer about a year ago after running the numbers for low to mid levels of printing and it just didn't make sense to spend as much as the places around me were charging.

It would be an interesting thing to look at what the pricing for things like this actually is around the country to see if something like this actually makes sense.

If I was doing a super low volume (but consistent) of prints I could see how the math on one of these lower plans makes sense given the options around me.

If you're willing to share, I am curious to know where you can get color copies starting at 5 cents per page. Although I don't spend much time looking at copy shop prices, I have never seen prices even close to that low.

So having a print service for average price At Home is make sense.