HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors::"Never own a printer again."
But HP enforces an Internet connection by having its TOS also state that HP may disrupt the service—and continue to charge you for it—if your printer's not online.
HP says it enforces a constant connection so that the company can monitor things that make sense for the subscription, like ink cartridge statuses, page count, and "to prevent unauthorized use of Your account." However, HP will also remotely monitor the type of documents (for example, a PDF or JPEG) printed, the devices and software used to initiate the print job, "peripheral devices," and any other "metrics" that HP thinks are related to the subscription and decides to add to its remote monitoring.
The All-In-Plan privacy policy also says that HP may “transfer information about you to advertising partners” so that they can "recognize your devices," perform targeted advertising, and, potentially, "combine information about you with information from other companies in data sharing cooperatives" that HP participates in. The policy says that users can opt out of sharing personal data.
The All-In-Plan TOS reads:
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.
My god, it's so bad
Remote Monitoring. Reads more like something a malware would do.
Holy shit, that’s like a step away from adding in refusal to print things that are potentially copyrighted or otherwise unacceptable
Or spend $15 more and get a Brother Laser printer.
😂
You’re absolutely right but seeing this comment in any recent HP thread is just getting hilarious.
At this point, with ALL this negative press about Hp inkjet printers, who’s buying them? I certainly would never even consider one at this point. Well I’d never buy an inkjet but I digress.
Honestly. How do they still have customers?? Are the majority of consumers just accepting this?
As per usual they are targeting companies. Just how Windows despite its flaws, high price and security issues remains a dominant force, through retailers and OEMs. HP will sign a contract with a company, they will replace toners and provide all kinds of services for X$ a month. Then you don't care it's garbage that keeps messing things up. Also people higher up who sign these deals have things printed for them, they don't mess with drivers.
People buy them because they are cheap. Ecotanks and Laser printers with good features cost a lot more upfront. Not everyone thinks things through long term.
The toner in my laser printer has lasted longer than my need for hard copy.
Fuck HP, I will definitely never own one of their printers ever again because I have a Brother laser printer that is fucking great, never breaks, and definitely never tries to rip me off.
$36/mo is 144 pages printed at my local library. If I needed to print that many pages, I'd get an enterprise MFP.
I had to print something yesterday... I submitted it to staples and went and picked it up.
Cost me $2
I expect that 10 pages will be all I'll have to print in 2024.
In the last 5 years I've spent less than $10 on printing.
If I had to actually print items.. I'd get a inexpensive brother laser printer
Last thing I had to print was in 2022, so I'm also content to just use printing services.
Not from HP, I hope...
Controversial opinion, but I like Kyocera's enterprise offerings. Xerox is always solid too.
I bet you it sends them the printer data so they can use it to train AI. It’s all in the ToC
The article literally says they sell your data to advertising partners. You're paying a monthly subscription to give away your personal data for something as basic as a fucking printer. If HP doesn't die my hope in humanity will be gone.
Imagine your thermostat sold your data so companies could solicit you with coats to buy, or your fridge sold the data of what food you have so shitty brands can beg you to buy their low quality trash because they spent half their budget on advertising.
I'm preaching to the choir but god I hate the ever growing data broker/aggressive targeted advertising trend.
Unfortunately HP isn't going anywhere. They have a lot of government contracts and likely a ton more with commercial businesses to supply hardware.
I imagine us peons at the home use level don't really show up on their radar when it comes to making these decisions.
I mean like, the content of your prints
I paid $100 for my Brother printer and I've spent...maybe $100 on toner cartridges since 2010.
So, yeah, HP can fuck off.
I'll just point out that I have a 20 year old Dell business class color laser printer. Got it off Craigslist a few years ago for 40 bucks. It has Ethernet, with a webui. You can disable the toner chips if you want and only lose toner amount estimates and then use any toner you want. We even got the duplex attachment for it a few years ago.
It is literally at least 3 feet tall and weighs at least 50 lbs.
It literally makes all the lights in my house flick when we turn it on. We once blew a circuit when it turned on.
We lovingly call it the Old Ding Dong Printer.
As long as it works, why would I ever replace it? Products have gone downhill.
In part that's why they keep adding these anti-consumer features. They don't want you to buy something lasting 40 years. That said I will buy original toner when the time comes from Brother, because they deserve the income for not being assholes. I only wish they had recycling services in my country so I could keep the e-trash to a minimum.
At this point I know I will never buy a printer, period.
I've heard good things about the tank printers
I picked up an Epson eco tank printer for my wife a couple years ago, and it's been fantastic! My wife, being a kindergarten teacher has a knack for absolutely killing printers... And this little Epson has been a work horse!!! I have nothing but good things to say about it!
just get a small laser printer. i got a Pantum Laser Printer, on sale, for like $40. Its on its 3rd refill after years and years of heavy printing for my wife while in school.
Costs $.10 to print at the library.
I’m fortunate to have a library just down the street so I go over there.
I also don’t have to print anything very often so I’ve only had to do that a couple of times in as many years.
I bought an HP m281 mfp printer 3-4 years ago and disabled automatic firmware updates when I was setting it up. Not too long after that I read that a new firmware release prevented 3rd party cartridges from working.
Anyway I bought new ink cartridges a couple of years ago after getting pop-ups saying the ink was getting low. Thing is, I haven't had to install them yet because despite the warnings the printer has been printing just fine with the original cartridges.
So in addition to blocking 3rd party cartridges HP is also lying about how much ink their cartridges contain.
F.U. HP.
All printers do this to some extent, I think. A combination of never wanting to report a false negative plus manufacturers making most of their money on consumables.
One of the cheapie monochrome Brother printers we have at work has been bitching about replacing the imaging drum for about four years now. We just dismiss the message and it's been printing just fine this whole time. It still is.
Right, my thought has always been I'd rather change the ink when the print quality bothers me, not because the company that sold me the printer is forcing me to.
I bought a Brother laser printer some years back for like $120 and am still working on the starter toner cartridge. HP can fuck right off with this.
My laser printer is so old that it's USB 1.0.
It's on its second toner cartridge and I have no plans to get rid of it.
Same here. BW Brother printer and I can get 3 toner cartridges for about $25. At about a dozen pages a day, those cartridges last me a whole year.
Never own a printer again.
I'll never own an HP printer again.
But not in the way they want...
I wouldn't pay half that if it was the only source to feed HP employees. Fuck HP in the ass with a gasoline soaked pickle.
But then again Brother was founded by known racist Hulk Hogan, so....
HP was dead to me 15+ years ago.
Fuckin' shit-merchants.
HP was dead to me as soon as I bought a Brother
I'm running a black & white wired Brother printer through a CUPS relay & I couldn't be happier without HP's bullshit
Brother is an excellent no-bullshit company. It's was a sigh of relief when I switched from HP's bullshit to shove-a-power-cord-and-forget approach of Brother. Even their wake up and time to first page is significantly better than HP's. I still didn't use up my original toner but once I do, I'll buy original. Their almost atypical approach at this point deserves to be rewarded.
I bought an old simple HP LaserJet like 4 years ago, it's probably the worst printer I've ever used and that includes the crappy bubblejet printer we had as a kid. Shit you not, I pretty much need to hand feed the thing, it almost always fails to grab a sheet out of the tray and it's usually crooked when it does.
Wish I hadn't given my brother printer to my parents when I graduated honestly, was solid af. It'd be 16 years old now but still going strong.
Even the low end is insane. $8 a month for 20 pages? You can go to a place like Staples or FedEx Office with a USB drive and get that printed out for less than a dollar.
It's actually 20c per page for about 4 bucks. Then there is tax for another 40c then 35c of gas and possibly 15 minutes of your time over and over and over again.
The right answer is a black and white laser. spend $199 once in the next 10-15 years
You could also go to the library.
This is what we did, sometimes we print, sometimes we don't, toner doesn't dry. Multi function 200 dollars. So far 5 years later, off brand toner and all is well.
In a lot of densely populated Asian cities, you can print to the shared printer of a local convenience store through the network without bringing a USB drive. You submit the job, it gets stored in the queue of the device, you go to the store (usually just downstairs from your apartment), scan a QR code, and the job prints. You can even pay online - it's great!
HP becoming Facebook soon
One of my fondest memories was beating our old HP printer to death with the baseball bat we keep for potential intruders. I now print at the local library and regret the beating incident less and less every year.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Really shitty management over at HP.
Are there any open source paper printers around? Like there are with 3D printers such as the Voron?
I don't know of any open source printers, but Brother laser printers are good. Brother is a 116-year-old Japanese industrial manufacturer. Their printers are simple, reliable, they support their printers for a very long time, and they make linux drivers. AND as far as I know they haven't tried any HP-style fuckery.
I also own a Brother printer since I ragequit HP last year. While playing with the settings last week i manually checked the firmware and noticed a possible update. When searching online for the release notes, i found thread after thread of people wanting to revert the update because it blocked third party toners? I hope Brother doesn't go the HP way...
Build a Voron, swap the toolhead for a ballpoint pen, ???, profit!
To my knowledge, no—the type of person who would be able to create such a printer usually isn't interested in making printouts. Theoretically, an impact character printer (daisy wheel) is within the range of an enthusiastic hobbyist with enough programming knowledge to write the driver. A laser printer of modest resolution should be within the reach of a skilled team. Inkjet I think requires too many specialized parts.
Fortunately laser printers are better in basically every way. Unfortunately don’t hold your breath.
They've been trying to make people sign up this for a while. Their drivers are pretty much malware that attempts to trick the user to sign up.
I doubt that it is a successful model for HP. They don't offer anything other than a stupid way to pay. Who the hell wants that.
HP can die in a fiery flameout.
People don't seem to realize this kind of thing will be really popular. If you have a small office or you don't do your own tech support, these deals sound awesome. Small fee and thing is always working when you need it. They don't think about how better laser is and how longer toner can last without being used, etc. They don't care, what they see is 36$ a month not to deal with any printer related issues. Kind of a brilliant move on HPs side. Make printers evil, then offer solution to evil via subscription. And you can bet your ass this one will magically have significantly better drivers and lower maintenance than others because those would bite into all that sweet income.
this is already a thing in the corporate world though and has been for over a decade, probably longer. what we don't want is this shit in our houses
what we don’t want is this shit in our houses
I'd totally go for such a deal for a fridge or washing machine. It would also have the nice side-effect that suddenly the company is interested in making products that actually last decades, if they don't, they have to come and fix or replace it on their dime and the money I give them I would've had to set aside for replacements, anyway.
Not for a printer, though: I use that thing very rarely, doesn't make sense to pay a monthly fee, and if it breaks down I can just go to the post office with an USB stick. Which btw is the perfect place for a public printer because letters is practically the only thing I print and while I'm there I can also buy postage because buying stamps doesn't make sense because they appear to change postage more frequently than I send letters.
I'd expect that if HP goes that way they'll use even more home customers to Brother, people just don't print enough these days to make subscriptions make sense. Also let fucking inkjets fucking die, already.
Yes and HP is kind of the king in those circles.
We FOSS users may not like it, but it is kind of a good deal for small businesses.
Something tells me it will go the same way as with other less user friendly services. Us tech-savy users will avoid this and advise people against it, and yet many will buy thinking it's great they don't have to deal with their printers not realizing they were forced into such position.
CEO Enrique is delusional
No, a ruthless evil genius. I think loads of people are going to subscribe, and they can therefore be categorised as delusional.
No home customer is going to find this worthwhile. Businesses might, but B2B already operates under different business model assumptions than B2C. This would cost more in 6 months than an average home user is likely to spend on printing over 5 years.
If you want to get customers to sign up for your subscription service, it has to at least appear like a win for them. This one is so blatantly a loss that it'll never take. At $10 it might work, and at $6 I can see a lot of people ending up doing it. The only thing I can think of is that this is designed to attract the negative attention before getting positive attention when they inevitably decide to drop the price to something that is actually viable.
That's an insane price. It would literally be cheaper to buy a new HP printer when the ink runs out.
I'd hate to defend this ridiculous company but the price is "up to" so cheaper plans are available, and the one you're quoting includes ink for 700 pages a month which I doubt a new printer for $35 will do.
1 - buy one of those refillable ink tank printers that are now actually common and not expensive;
2 - buy ink bottles at aliexpress for $10 4x200ml ink or around that;
3 - years of ink for a few bucks.
If you have a cartridge printer, search on aliexpress for refillable cartridges for your printer and do step 2 anyway (you can usually refill those easily with a seringe).
Don't feed their greed.
How out of touch is HP? Every year I print less than the previous year. The use case for printers is dwindling. I lived quite happily without a printer for a decade. They need to find another business.
Let's not let them find another business to ruin... Stick with printers and fade into obscurity please HP :)
i had one of the cheapest versions of this plan; it seems nice, but the cheap ones have such low limits that you're always a bit paranoid to print too freely or joyfully. plus the bullshit how they software lock the ink if you don't pay and would rather pay shipping / recycling back just so you can't have it for 'free'
i had one of the cheapest versions of this plan; it seems nice, but...
LOL, no, it really doesn't. Even just at first glance, the entire concept of a home user renting a printer is blatantly exploitative and obviously terrible.
Weird thought, printing "freely or joyfully."
I hate printing documents and do everything I can to avoid it, even with my little Epson inkjet that is free of most of that garbage (it does bitch at you if you use off-brand cartridges but will allow it).
Other than the occasional form or whatever that HAS to be on paper, about the only thing I print is CAD drawings so I can carry them to the wood shop with me. And I'd like to eliminate even that if I could find the right electronic device to run it on, which I'm not sure exists. (I'd like to have an ARM tablet or maybe convertible laptop running desktop Linux and FreeCAD, but there's some mutual exclusivity in there).
(I’d like to have an ARM tablet or maybe convertible laptop running desktop Linux and FreeCAD, but there’s some mutual exclusivity in there).
Run the FreeCAD on your main machine. Put a remote desktop server on it as well, and run Remmina or some other client on the tablet. Drops the requirements considerably, and should be good enough for the application you have in mind.
$36 a month for something I would use maybe 2 or 3 times a year? That's $432 I would pay for those 2-3 prints. Subscription based printer accessibility (not ownership) is a lossing strategy for normies like me. Maybe it may work for b2b segment. Aslo, Fuck you, HP. Thanks for convincing me not to buy your other products.
I still own a HP laser printer (older model from 5-10 years ago) which does not have the online connectivity requirement and the third party cartridges could last for ages.
As long as the printer dies I will forget HP and its bullshit exists and never touch their products again.
I recently trashed my HP and bought a really old Dell LaserJet from government auction. $25 and it came with a 60% full toner. Been using it for 2 months and still have 54% toner left.
I'll probably never replace this thing and keep fixing it until I can't find parts anymore.
I have a Samsung laser printer and same.
My last HP printer had a serial port. It was all down hill from there.
HP can go fuck themselves
I wouldn't pay $36 for an HP printer that they didn't monitor much less per month
Meanwhile, physical media is on the decline.
Why should I care about company X launching Y, where Y is uninnovative? I percieve this post as an ad
Yup dawg, we heard you like economic rent…
I'll just print off the odd thing I need a paper copy of from work and continue as I've done for a dexade by puposefully denying myself from the sincere privilege of paying HP another god damned red cent for as long as draw breath, kthxbai. 🖕
Too bad my old employer stopped allowing employees to access the printers. You have to email your document to a printer admin and they will print it for you.
My last printer was an hp , the ink only lasted a few months. I’m done with it. At most I print a few items per month so we now go to fedex office and have it printed there for $0.20
HP, Hilarious Proposition. Corperate guillotine Here Please, HP.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee.
HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment.
Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages.
A web connection can also concern users about security or HP-issued firmware updates that make printers stop functioning with non-HP ink.
HP says it enforces a constant connection so that the company can monitor things that make sense for the subscription, like ink cartridge statuses, page count, and "to prevent unauthorized use of Your account."
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.
The original article contains 471 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Apart from this printer nonsense, why do people hate HP so much?
They sell ink for higher prices than champagne. And make it impossible to use third party ink.
Their products have become pretty junk as of recent, at least on the consumer side. I hear good things about their enterprise devices.
HP was making garbage in the 2000s. Always has been, always will be.
Absolutely hate the fact that their drivers and firmware updates (for servers) are stashed away behind ludacris support contracts.
Have a simplivity stack at work, and for two nodes with an off site DR, needed an $8,000 support contract just to get the latest drivers and firmware to upgrade to the latest VMware version simplivity supports.
One shot deal, as we are already planning the move away from VMware and getting plans together for budgets to do so...
Maybe they all do this...? Admittedly I've not had to go looking for drivers or firmware updates on the few dells we have as they are air gapped systems that just run for a very specific purpose... So I honestly am not sure. But HP absolutely sucks in this regard as far as Im concerned.
I got one for you: You're on a tightrope of balancing security and your pocketbook, because a firmware update might also include DRM to brick any aftermarket toners you might have purchased.
Oh, you don't wanna pay out the nose for gEnUiNe HP?? What's your threat model look like?
Ridiculous.
Everybody it's going nuts nowadays..
Thanks! I'll never own an HP printer! Good advice!
HP anything really.
HP stands for hot paninis, because their laptops get so hot they can be used as a panini press.
Dev One laptop isn’t bad, got one on eBay for less than half of its original price and it’s a solid machine. Other than that, HP can chew glass.
Was HP any good ever?
I remember disliking all of their Laps when I was a teen, but maybe it was a bad purchase by my parents too...