Whenever you go out to buy a new printer, it seems like the start of a new journey, as you will venture your way through the learnings and the setbacks that come with the unique experience of an unknown printer. However, the knowledge that you get with purchasing an HP printer, it’s just that amazing. So it does not shock anyone that numerous people prefer to buy HP printers.
They have high-reliability factors on their side, an excellent warranty, the perfect high build quality of materials, superior print ink, and a lot of capacity and maintenance costs are low. Then comes the query of the instant ink program. Some people are pretty wary of it; some people are all for it; the main questions always remain the same no matter what.
The question is that can I use an HP printer without instant Ink? And while you may search the web and be mislead from one point to another, this article will guide you point to point on if it is necessary for you to purchase the Instant Ink Subscription package by HP or not. And can you survive by buying your cartridges and figuring out the costs yourself?
So without further ado, let’s get started on the answer to your questions.
Contents
What is Instant Ink? How Does it Work?
So, now that you have bought your new HP printer, you bring it to your home and set it up whatever model it is. And you get a pop-up prompt on the screen of your laptop asking if you want to subscribe to the “instant ink” subscription. What is it?
The Instant Ink package is a subscription package offered by HP’s company, similar to other subscription packages such as Netflix or Spotify. In essence, they provide and send out ink cartridges to your address for a limited price, and on the one hand, it reduces the effort you need to put in to buy the cartridges yourself since HP learns your manners.
Instant Ink is considerably cheaper and provides bigger ink cartridges than conventional cartridges. Let’s see how it works now. Essentially, HP asks you to pay a certain amount of fees each month and subscribe to one or the other plan.
You can subscribe to five plans, the first one, Occasional Plan, which offers 50 pages per month; the Moderate Plan that will provide 100 pages per month, the Frequent Plan, which provides 300 pages per month. And then the Business Plan, which will setback you costs for 700 pages per month, and then there is 15 Page free plan that costs nothing.
Things to know before subscribing
If you are considering subscribing to the Instant Ink program, you may wanna think again, as we will give you a few things to know before subscribing, and then we will move on to answering the question, “can I use HP printer without instant ink”?
Activity monitoring
By subscribing to the Instant Ink program, you singlehandedly hand over your information to HP, as to send out new cartridges, they will track your ink levels, the documents you write, the laptop you use, etc.
Not instant
the word instant is a bit misleading here, as stand shipping can still take up to 8-9 business days to ship out the ink cartridges, so you might be waiting for a while longer than you anticipated, and you might not like that.
Internet connection
For HP to monitor your activity, your printers need to have a constant active internet connection for HP to pick up on the number of pages you use per month, so if it is laggy, then it could mess up with the entire process.
Specific printer
there are high chances that the Instant Ink Subscription package could not work with the particular printer you are using. There are only particular printers that can subscribe to the Instant Ink Program. So make sure you take note of that before deciding to subscribe or not.
Do You Need It or Not?
After considering all the things, you need to know before subscribing to the Instant ink program, whether you can go without it or need it. One of the biggest things you need to know is that you give companies like HP a significant chance to get vast margin profits if you subscribe to the program.
The simple answer is yes; your printer will do just fine without the need for the program. Not subscribing will allow you to go out and pick and choose the ink cartridge yourself and, therefore, get to know ink knowledge. Secondly, refills are your best friends when it comes to ink cartridges as they are highly cost-effective and save you time.
You do need to know that if you *do* subscribe to the program, then there is a high chance HP can shut down your printer from working on ordering a new one, and it will render the printer useless for a few hours. Therefore it is better to stay clear of the program. And for people who don’t print hundreds of pages in a month, a subscription plan is borderline useless.
How to Cancel the Program
You may decide to still subscribe to the program, and that’s fine, but you might want to know a backup option on how to cancel the program if you decide against it. And it’s a pretty simple method.
Go to your computer’s settings page, click on “Device and Printers,” and click on your account there. You will have an option to cancel your subscription; you may want to click on that. Through that, you will need to enter your email and its passwords, so enter that. This button will contact HP to cancel the services, and it will, as soon as the conceding month ends.
And after that, there will be no more services or subscriptions from HP’s site; therefore, be wary of that. You will need to go out and buy new ink cartridges. So, in conclusion, let’s figure out I can use HP printer without instant Ink.
Conclusion
Now that we have provided you with all the necessary information, you may need to figure out can I use HP printer without instant Ink; the following steps are in your own hands to figure out.
Therefore take a look at what the article said, and contact HP if you need to; give them a call for more information, and they should guide you for further help that you might require. Have fun printing!