Please stop supporting that. That business model really needs to die.

> Basically, you pay $3 a month and can print up to 50 pages. HP remotely monitors your ink levels and sends you replacement cartridges automatically when the cartridges need to be replaced.

Ugh dollar shave club for printers or something?

I refuse to engage in thing-as-a-service. The only reason companies do this is because they know if they bleed a little bit out of you each month you're more likely to say "it's only a couple of dollars". It all adds up costing huge amounts in your monthly expenses.

They then also know there's a huge portion of customers paying for this who aren't using their '50 sheets', so wow, they've just built a model where customers pay for a thing they don't use and they don't have to provision for.

> Please stop supporting that. That business model really needs to die.

I would up vote you more than once if I could.

My friends love dollar shave club, and I'm like "buy a safety razor for $20-30 bucks and a bulk pack of razor blades and you will set FOR YEARS.

My grandfather would sharpen his razor blades on his jeans, one would only need one razor blade if maintenance included sharpening the razor.

I use straight razors. With the right care they will indeed last a lifetime but I’d caution that it’s more than ‘sharpen it on your jeans’. For a start most are made of mild steel rather than stainless so you need to store them completely dry otherwise they’ll rust (so keeping them in the bathroom is hard given it tends to be a moist environment).

Nitpick: mild steel is awful for blades as is it is too soft and cannot be hardened. Most likely they are some sort of high-carbon steel.

Sorry, yes you’re right! Carbon steel. I should add that you can buy stainless steel straight razors but they’re much harder to sharpen properly so I think not very popular.

> My friends love dollar shave club, and I'm like "buy a safety razor for $20-30 bucks and a bulk pack of razor blades and you will set FOR YEARS.

I got given one of these https://getrockwell.com/products/rockwell-6s-gift-set after I mentioned I wanted a stainless steel one and it was given to me as a gift.

Apparently it started from a kickstarter a few years ago https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rockwellrazors/rockwell...

The person who gave it to me knew I am environmentally conscious. I remember reading that those cartridge razors are really bad for the environment as they are a mix of steel and plastic.

Now I can just use regular razor blades https://www.amazon.com/Feather-Razor-Blades-Hi-stainless-Dou... $22 for 100.

Feels good to not be locked into some proprietary mounting too, kind of the same feeling as using free software. hah.

I prefer it to my old Gillete one. More blades is not better, that is all marketing, and they just get clogged, ugh.

I don't see how being in a "club" that I have to pay any kind of "annual" fees would help me.

The idea is I have reduced my costs significantly and have everything I would want. Occasionally I buy a new tub of shaving cream when I run out. I am adult enough to go "that looks like a nice scent I will try that", and then decide if I want to buy more next time or buy something else.

I absolutely detest "monthly" or "weekly" payments of anything. The only exception I make is for utilities, or service contracts. If it's neither of those things why should I pay more than once? or pay for someone to trickle samples out in the post to me?

Or buy an electric shaver. Mine probably cost about AU$80, and has lasted at least 6 years. No sign of it going wrong, and I've never needed to replace/sharpen the blades, though apparently replacement blades are a thing.

Depending on how heavy your beard is, an electric shaver does not come close to the cleanliness a "wet" razor will get you. Maybe your mileage/needs vary.

> an electric shaver does not come close to the cleanliness a "wet" razor will get you

As someone who used to use an electric shaver since his teenage years I wholeheartedly agree. I do not grow a beard, hate them in fact and am always clean shaven.

I never ever once got a shave anywhere near as close as I did with a razor. After a while you can do it in the shower blind without a mirror just from feel.

On the other hand you never cut yourself with an electric razor. I used a wet razor for years but recently switched to electric because of this.

> On the other hand you never cut yourself with an electric razor. I used a wet razor for years but recently switched to electric because of this.

I only cut myself very early on when I was new to it. That was about 5 years ago. I have now been using a razor exclusively for years now and cannot remember when I last cut myself.

I also use it for trimming other places too, haven't cut there either.

Depends on the model. My first electric razor lasted somewhere around 10-12 years with no issues, before it broke and I needed a replacement. The replacement was a newer version of the same model, and caused bleeding around my adam's apple every day guaranteed; I downgraded and haven't had any issues since.

> The replacement was a newer version of the same model, and caused bleeding around my adam's apple every day guaranteed

Those rotary ones are notoriously bad, they will cause pulling. I found the foil based ones like the braun series 3 to be a lot better in that regard, closer shave too, still nothing like a razor though.

It wasn't a rotary one though. The one that caused bleeding was a Braun Series 1-195s, while the good one is a Braun Series 1-190s.

The blades on the 195s are parallel with the foil though, while the 190s are perpendicular, so I'm sure it's the same problem.

Interesting. Mine is an old Philips Philishave, which use the rotary blades.

Pulling isn't really an issue unless my facial hair is extremely overdue for a shave. eg 4-5 days worth of hair.

When that happens, I just use my trimmer to take it back to near stubble, then use the above Philishave to finish things off.

You definitely should replace the blades at least every couple of years. --The difference after doing so is noticeable.

Buy a cut-throat and be set for life.

Seriously though, I have a safety razor, but I can't get a satisfactory shave out of something where the head doesn't pivot, so I use the local coops budget razors. They are pretty much the same as dollar shave clubs, but I don't have it here, and I rather not buy shit on subscription.

There are two things in the home that can be reused when I am dead: my model M and the safety razor.

> Buy a cut-throat and be set for life.

You can get straight edge razors, a place I went to the other day was selling them. https://www.beardandblade.com.au/collections/straight-razors

They look really expensive, but I guess you'd only ever buy one once and then just sharpen with a strop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_strop

I think they would only be good for 'certain' places on your body though, ie your face.

>I refuse to engage in thing-as-a-service.

As a side note, whether one uses it or not, it should be called what it is: thing-as-a-monthly-subscrition (often automatically renewing itself).

Maybe it is just me, but to me something "as a service" is still something I pay "per use" and not something I pay a monthly or yearly fee in exchange for a given limited amount of something that I may or may not use.

There are legitimate advantages to this business model, and even though I'm not a fan of it myself I can appreciate the value proposition. One way to look at it is a form of insurance - it distributes an irregular large payment into a regular smaller monthly payment that makes it easier for budgeting. That can provide significant benefit in some contexts.

I mean - I can see why you would say that but Instant Ink has a free tier, and I actually am OK with selling my infrequent printing data for 15 pages a month + free ink so that I have a home printer for the few occasion when I need it.

There is no minimum usage level, and the fact they might know that some airlines require I print a boarding pass every few months, or some government for needs to be printed, filled out and posted - that's really not so bad for free (+ data).

I'm OK with them receiving that data.

$3 (I'm assuming USD) will buy you more than 100mL of black ink:

http://www.3000rpm.com/acatalog/Epson-Continuous-Ink-System-...

I have a CIS printer and dilute even further, usually a 5:1 ratio (it becomes slightly bluish beyond that point), but even as-is 100mL will print far more than 50 pages -- probably closer to 5000 if not more. At that point the cost of paper becomes more significant.

Edit: it looks like the other colours are the same price (when I last bought ink, which was a long time ago, CMY was slightly more expensive):

http://www.3000rpm.com/acatalog/Epson-HP-Canon-Brother-Conti...

Thats $360 over 10 years. Spend that right now to get an excellent color laser printer that will last that long. Whereas your inkjet is very likely to fail sometime in the next two years (4~5 year typical lifespan). And with the amount of printing you're doing you probably won't even run out the toner that comes included with the printer.

In my family we use Instant Ink and actually love it. We're on the largest plan (300 pages/mo). We spend less on ink now than we used to, and it is a huge relief to not have to make a late-night run to the big box store because the school project is due the next day and the stupid magenta has run out. The ink is always there, waiting to be swapped out, then you recycle the used cartridges when they're done. It's incredibly convenient for us, is a cost-savings, and I am reasonably okay with the fact that they know how many pages I print and the types of documents.

HOWEVER, I was recently looking at the bandwidth stats from my network switch, and was pretty shocked to see the printer has sent out several hundred megabytes of data back to HP over the past month. I knew it had to communicate with the mothership so they could charge me for my usage, but that should be a packet that says something like "User XYZ just printed 7 pages," which would reasonably be 5kb per job. I have no idea why hundreds of megs of data need to go out, and so I'm planning of on doing some DPI investigation the to set what on the world it feels like it needs to be sending.

3 cent per page is surprisingly competitive, especially for an inkjet. I'm using a Color Laserjet 3600, a toner cartridge for which is about 40 dollars on Ebay. A colour cartridge lasts ~ 4000 pages, black ~ 6000 pages, that's 4 cents per page. Even though that is with second-hand supplies off Ebay it's still more than the official automatic ink in the mail.

>"User XYZ just printed 7 pages," which would reasonably be 5kb per job

Actually (of course IMHO) that should reasonably be (including the percentage of ink covered/black and a validation hash) below 150 bytes.

Sure, but let's face it, I don't think HP's top priority here is actually trying hard to make it small... :|

Yep, I surely agree :), the point is only on the use of reasonably , by allowing everyone to "grow" data (both when actually needed and when it is not) shifting everytime the range of "reasonable" we have today's monsters (web sites, OS's, you name it).

And surely I am (more than a bit) old-fashioned, but when you can use the Doom as a unit of measure, JFYI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120

then it isn't reasonable anymore.

>print up to 50 pages

Is this some economy ultra light printer or something? I get several hundreds of pages from each syringe refill.

It’s 50 pages per month. The cartridges they get are probably the 150 or 200 per page ones. In other word they’re paying a monthly fee to get a max of 3 or 4 cartridges a year. Probably less.

I’ve grown to hate the modern ink jet printers with a passion. I moved on to the consumer laser printers. I’m sure I’ll hate them too soon enough.

What does the syringe refill cost? I also have the instant ink service and I want out

Ink seems to be virtually free at Monoprice. Like, "It costs more to ship this than the ink, so I guess I'll just buy 10 of each color, but now I have a drawer full of ink cartridges and need to find more things to print."

I refill it from the bottle. The bottle costed me under a fiver some years ago.

> But the printer companies tend to be doing more and more to make that a pain

It's actually the opposite, recently all the brands have been introducing "ink tank" style printers (e.g. Epson EcoTank, Canon MegaTank) where you just squirt ink into the printer from a bottle, no DRM involved.

i can't tell if this is real

I bought my printer for immigration purpose, I would be way over on some months.