What's actually going on
Copier pricing is quoted three different ways — payment, click rate and total cost of operations — and only the third is comparable across vendors.
Bundled agreements hide which part of the payment is equipment and which is service.
What to do in the next 48 hours
- 1Establish your cost per page for mono and color separately.
- 2Ask your current vendor to split the invoice into equipment, service and supplies.
- 3Get one competitive quote structured as total cost of operations over the full term.
- 4Compare over 60 months, not per month. Short-term payments hide long-term totals.
The honest tradeoffs
- The lowest total cost is sometimes a machine that is slightly slower than you want. Speed you rarely use is expensive.
- Switching vendors carries a real transition cost in setup and staff time. It should be worth more than a few dollars a month.
Your next step
Questions people ask next
- What should a business copier cost per month?
- It depends on speed, color and volume, but the useful comparison is total cost of operations: the lease payment plus expected click charges at your real monthly volume, over the full term.
More on costs that don't add up
- My copier bill keeps going up and nobody can explain why
- Why are we printing so much?
- How much should a copy actually cost?
- What are copier overage charges and why did mine spike?
- How do we actually reduce paper usage?
- How do I track print costs by department?
- Is colour printing worth what we're paying for it?
- My copier lease is ending and I don't know what to do
- My lease auto-renewed and I never agreed to it
- I have to return a copier and I don't know the rules