Business Ink & Toner Costs
How Much Are You Really Spending on Ink & Toner? The printer might be paid for. The cartridges definitely aren’t. Business ink and toner costs are one of those expenses that can quietly get out of hand. A cartridge gets ordered, then another one, then another department orders something different. Because it normally sits under stationery or office supplies, nobody ever really adds it all together. Ask Us to Review Your Print Costs £30 a month is £360 a year If you’re spending more than this on ink or toner, send us the printer models. We’ll tell you whether it’s worth looking at properly. The short version: the fact you’ve already bought the printer doesn’t mean the decision is finished. If the machine is expensive to run, you keep paying for that original decision every time somebody orders another cartridge. The cost nobody sees properly Ink and Toner Can Get Lost in Stationery Costs Ask a business what it paid for a printer and somebody can normally tell you. Ask what that same printer has cost in ink or toner over the last year and it is often a different story. One Cartridge Doesn’t Look That Expensive Someone spends £60 or £80 and it doesn’t look dramatic. But do it repeatedly, across several colours and several printers, and suddenly it is a proper annual cost. Different Departments Buy Different Things Accounts has one printer, reception has another, sales bought one because they needed colour. Before long you’ve got several makes, several cartridges and nobody looking at the total. Nobody Thinks of It as a Print Cost If every cartridge is coded to stationery, the business never really sees what each printer costs to run. That’s normally where the surprise starts. What cartridges actually cost You Don’t Need to Print Much Before It Starts Adding Up There isn’t one sensible “average cartridge price” because a small ink cartridge and a high-capacity business toner are completely different things. But current genuine toner prices show how quickly the numbers can move. HP 207A Colour Set £357.46 At the manufacturer prices checked on 25 September 2026, one black and three colour HP 207A cartridges come to about £357.46 including VAT. See HP pricing ↗ Canon 067 Colour Set £336.46 At the Canon UK prices checked on 25 September 2026, black, cyan, magenta and yellow come to about £336.46. See Canon pricing ↗ Those are examples, not an average for every printer in the UK. The point is simply this: one set of toner on a fairly normal office printer can already run into hundreds of pounds. The bit people miss “We’ve Already Bought the Printer” Is Exactly Why Nobody Looks at It I hear this a lot. The printer is already owned, so people think the decision has been made and there is no point reviewing it. The printer might be paid for, but the running cost isn’t. If you’ve bought the wrong machine for the amount you’re printing, you can keep paying for that decision over and over again. Another black cartridge. Another set of colours. Another £100. Another £300. That doesn’t mean you should automatically throw the printer away. It means you should stop looking at the purchase price as if it was the whole cost. A simple rule If You’re Spending More Than £30 a Month, Let Us Look at It £30 isn’t some magic number. It’s just enough recurring spend to make a quick review worthwhile. Monthly spend Annual spend Why it is worth checking £30 £360 Enough to ask whether the printer is really suited to the amount being printed. £50 £600 That can already be more than some desktop printers cost to buy. £100 £1,200 Now it is worth comparing the real cost per page. £250 £3,000 At this point, look at the whole fleet, not just one cartridge. Send Us Your Printer Models It gets worse with several printers One Printer Is Easy to See. Ten Printers Hide the Cost A lot of print fleets aren’t really fleets at all. They’re just a collection of printers people have bought over the years because somebody needed one. Different Makes Means Different Everything Different cartridges, different spare stock, different drivers and different faults. It isn’t always wrong, but nobody planned it that way. The Spend Gets Split Across the Business If each department buys its own toner, the overall cost is easy to miss. Add it all together and the numbers can look very different. If you’ve got several printers around the business, even if every one of them is already bought and paid for, send us the models. We’ll show you what the setup could look like if it was planned around what people actually print. The obvious answer isn’t always the best answer “We’ll Just Buy Compatible Toner” Can Create Another Problem Compatible cartridges can save money. Some are perfectly usable. Some aren’t. The problem is treating every compatible as if it is the same product with a cheaper sticker on the box. Cheaper Doesn’t Always Mean Cheaper Per Page Look at the yield. We’ve seen cheaper cartridges where the saving looked good until you compared how much usable toner or ink you were actually getting. The Colour Can Change Toner and ink are part of the print process. Change the formulation and you can change colour, density, gradients and consistency. If colour matters to the business, that matters. We’ve Seen Them Cause Machine Problems In our own service work we’ve seen poor third-party supplies associated with leaks, contamination, recognition problems and inconsistent toner transfer. That doesn’t mean every compatible cartridge will cause a fault. It means the quality of the cartridge matters. Think About How Long the Print Needs to Last I have seen one extreme case involving archived accounting documents where the print had faded so badly that information was effectively lost when the documents were needed again. That doesn’t prove every compatible cartridge will do this, but if you’re printing documents that need




