How to Calculate Your Printer Costs 101

When buying a product, we all want to get the best deal we can. Here at ManagedPrint, we wanted to be able to offer you some insight on which affordable printers can provide the biggest value for the dollar. 

When you look at affordable laser printers, there are three parts of costs that need to be considered. First, there is the equipment cost, second is the supply costs and finally, there are the maintenance costs.

In this article we will cover how these costs are factored in and how you can control these costs in the future.

Equipment Costs:

Equipment cost is how much the actual laser printer costs to purchase. Some of the desktop models you will see for as low as a few hundred dollars and as high as $10,000. If a device is more than $10k, it will normally have other feature capabilities and not technically fall into the “laser printer” classification. 

This is perhaps the easiest of the three factors to know your costs on. You will normally have an initial purchase cost, and you will use that. If you are leasing, you can use the monthly amount times the number of months you are leasing the laser printer for.

Supplies Costs:

Once you have a printer, you will need supplies for the printer to be able to run. This is like buying gas for your car. With this, you will look at all of the consumable items your printer uses. Examples of this are toner cartridges, drum units, fusers, etc. These will have a cost you pay and you can add up these costs. 

Another important thing to be aware of is the manufacturer’s ratings for these supply items. For example, you could pay $100 and get 5,000 pages worth of toner and think that is a better deal than paying $250 and getting a toner cartridge that lasts for 25,000 pages. The truth is, the toner that costs $100 costs 2 cents a page ($100/5000) compared to the $250 toner that is just $.01 per page ($250/25,000).  

This part can get confusing for people, especially if they have a lot of printers, because most color devices have 10 to 13 consumable items each.

Service Costs:

You have your printer, and you have your supplies. The final factor is when there is an issue, there is a cost to repair the device. You can add up the service tickets and that would be your final hard cost for your laser printer. There are soft costs we can discuss in other articles like time to manage supply orders, efficiency of staff, inefficient printing policies, etc. But, for the purposes of this article, these are the three costs you need to consider for each of your printers.

A Better Solution:

Rather than having to calculate all of these figures you have spent and divide by the number of pages to see if you got a good deal (after it is too late to do anything because the money is already spent), ManagedPrint offers a better alternative. We offer plans where you buy the device and supplies and we give you the service for free. We also offer a cost per print plan, so you know exactly what each printer and copier is costing down to the penny and not losing money by having to buy a supplies closet full of toner. 

We auto ship toner as it is needed and we provide reports so you can see where your costs are coming from and if there are any devices eating up your IT budget by being inefficient. 

Contact us today to see how ManagedPrint can help your business.