My milk subscription will come and pick up the delivery box if I cancel. And the milk will expire by the end of the month.

My trash service will come and pick up the cans when I cancel service.

Do you get a new delivery box every month, and a new trash can every month, and get to keep all of the old ones indefinitely, but then have to return them all at once if you cancel? Does your milk normally not expire at all, but suddenly all expire at once when you stop getting more?

If it were the same they'd come and get the delivery box and superglue the caps on any already delivered bottles of milk in your fridge.

I’m not sure I see the relevance. I’m paying for a printing service, when I stop paying, I stop getting a printing service.

The fact that there’s physical ink cartridges involved is neither here-nor-there. It’s a practical requirement, nothing else.

Rental cars these days will disable themselves if you don’t return at the of the rental. The SIM card in your phone stops working when the subscription ends etc etc. There are plenty of services involving physical assets that stop working when you stop paying.

Also how much printing do you do? I get an ink cartridge maybe once a year.

If I pay for a subscription for e.g. food delivery, I get something delivered every n days. If I stop paying, they don't come back and steal all the previously delivered but unused parts either.

What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

With my SIM card, that's actually the case, too: It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.

If you pay for a subscription to Audible and accrue monthly credits, they will steal the unused ones back when you cancel the subscription.

Not making a judgement either way, just adding more data.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Obviously not. You’ve paid for food delivery, you got what you paid for, why would they take it back? It’s not like you’re paying for cooked meals.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Have you ever read or tried to signup for the service? Literally everything is priced per page. A no point do they say you’re getting a subscription ink service, it’s quite explicitly a per page printing service.

I’m sorry, but you bought a service that clearly sold and priced as “$X per month for Y printed pages”, and misinterpret that as “$X per month, for Y ink”, then that’s on you.

Personally, I'd recommend just nuking HP from orbit until it's gone.

Printers, and their manufacturers sucks, and HP is the worst of the bunch. No one should ever even try to defend them, there is nothing defensible about them.

Especially considering you can now buy printers that only ever work with instant ink and reject all other cartridges.

(Btw, I'm using a modded brother printer)

I'm all for that, but only if we can also nuke all HP Printers crowding the 5GHz spectrum with their "HP JetDirect" 5Ghz APs. My neighbor has one, and I swear that useless HP printer AP is louder than my wifi router in many parts of my house. I will never, ever buy an HP printer because of that.

> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".

Where does that expectation come from, exactly? The name?

The pricing page is clearly and explicitly all about pages per month [1].

> It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.

So you're comparing a different type of plan here.

Prepaid mobile plans like this are akin to Amazon's "subscribe and save" program: they'll charge and send you a cartridge on whatever frequency you like, regardless of usage. Choose too frequent and you'll amass as huge stockpile; too infrequent and you'll run out of ink.

Instant Ink is like 'regular' mobile plans: you get x GB per month for a certain price. If you cancel your plan, even though you only used 5% of your data for that month, you don't get to continue your plan.

HP's FAQ even say this [2]:

> If you decide to cancel your HP Instant Ink, you can go back to using HP original Standard or XL cartridges. HP Instant Ink cartridges will not work after the end of the current billing cycle in which you cancel. To continue printing after your billing cycle ends, make sure you have standard replacement ink cartridges ready to use in your printer.

The alternative to all this is to just buy regular cartridges as you need them.

[1] https://instantink.hpconnected.com/sg/en/l/v2?jumpid=af_e1d0...

[2] https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/instant-ink/faq.html#:~:te...

They don't send you stuff every month. You pay a fixed monthly price for a certain number of pages of whatever color/quality you want along with some page count rollover benefits. You no longer buy cartridges. The printer phones home when the cartridge runs low (well before that based on their proprietary predictive algorithm) and a new one arrives soon thereafter automatically. It's not like you have more than 1-2 cartridges at a time. And you never pay for them in any case.

Incidentally you can still install standard (non-subscription tied - e.g. bought at Costco) cartridges and the subscription status is then irrelevant (but of course you pay for those cartridges so they're yours to do with as you please unlike the rented subscription ones), but that's not the point (for the most part).

I find it handy for super low volume printing needs at home.