Ways to Save Money on Printing Costs

Printing is often considered to be expensive for homes and businesses. What’s more, it’s a recurring expense, as paper, ink and toner needs to be replaced on a regular basis. However, there are numerous ways to save lots of money on your printing.

Our guide outlines some of the most cost-effective ways to print and lets you know what you should be looking for when buying printing products. From the well-known, tried and tested money-saving tips to the lesser-known ideas. Cut down the cost of printing with our handy guide, whether you’re printing at home or trying to budget your office’s printing expenditures.

1. Plan Out Your Printing Costs

The first tip is the most obvious and for good reason, plan out your total printing expenditure. This allows you to identify any areas where you can make a potentially significant cost saving. Think to yourself, what do I need to spend money on to print and how can I save money during each step of the printing process?

Below we’ll go into more detail about how to save money on each expense but here’s a general overview:

Printer – Make sure, (if you haven’t already bought your printer), that you choose a machine that best suits how you’ll print. For example, all-in-one printers are a nice way to save money if you need other functions from your printer, such as scanning and faxing.

Paper – Think about what you need to print, typed up notes for your own benefit won’t require premium quality paper, for example. Buy paper in bulk to save money, with the added benefit of not needing to buy it as often.

Printer Ink – When planning out your printing costs, you may question why printer ink is so expensive. For most people, the ink and toner your printer consumes will be the most significant recurring expense when printing. Luckily, there are many different ways to greatly reduce this cost. Switching to compatible cartridges can help a lot with this.

Now that we’ve outlined what you’ll need to spend money on, we can show you how to reduce the cost of printing significantly.

2. Buy Compatible Ink Cartridges

Compatible ink cartridges, such as our Cartridge People Compatible Own Brand range, are a great way to save a lot of money on your printing expenses. When you buy compatible printer ink, you can make a significant cost-saving, when compared to only buying OEM products.

By switching to Cartridge People Compatible Own Brand printer consumables, you can save on average 37% on standard ink cartridges. Also, you can save 38% on high-capacity printer toner. (These numbers are based on  a like-for-like purchase.) Buying compatible ink cartridges can lower your average printout price.

Allowing you to save even more, often these cartridges will contain more ink for less money. Cartridge People Compatible Own Brand cartridges can contain up to 325% more ink than the OEM equivalent (based on a Compatible Own Brand HP 305XL black ink cartridge).

Some can be hesitant to switch to compatible ink cartridges as they’re concerned about print quality. Our Compatible Own Brand ink and toner produces a high-quality print output that matches that of the OEM.

Also, all our Cartridge People Compatible Own Brand ink and toner is covered by our Lifetime Printer Guarantee.

It makes sense when trying to save money on your printing costs to only pay for what you’ll realistically need to print. OEM’s sometimes offer an ink subscription service – read our guide on how to cancel HP Instant Ink, for more information.

3. Choose High-Capacity Ink Cartridges

Sometimes you may need to spend more initially, to save over the long-term. Are high-capacity inkjet cartridges worth the extra cost, then? The answer is a definitive yes!

This is especially true for businesses and people who need to print regularly. High-capacity ink cartridges are better value for money if you’re printing often. Yes, it will cost more at first but it will be more affordable than repeatedly buying the same ink or toner cartridge. This is because the larger amount of ink results in a lower cost per page to print.

It’s important to check the product details for information about how much your cartridge will be able to print before needing to be replaced. Product listings may show you how many ‘ml’ of ink the cartridge contains. Otherwise, it should tell you how many pages it will normally print before running out.

4. How to Save Money When Buying a Printer

If you haven’t decided which printer you need yet or are looking to replace your current model, it’s important that you do your research. You can make great savings if you know what to look for. This is true both when choosing the printer itself and thinking about the consumables that it will use.

Home printer prices (and printer prices in general for that matter), can vary widely. This is because there are so many additional features available that have been designed to help with the printing process. These can include mobile printing from a smartphone, touchscreens and much more.

When researching printers then, it’s important to think about what the printer will be used for and how often. Whilst inkjet printers are generally cheaper (both to buy and to run) and have been associated more with home users than businesses, there’s more crossover these days.

Small businesses, for example, may opt for inkjet printers as a way to save money. Multifunction printers are also great for small businesses, as they mean you don’t have to spend money on extra machines to scan, copy and fax.

However, if you or your business prints a high volume of documents, laser printers are definitely the more suitable choice. Yes they’re more expensive – printer toner definitely costs more – but toner cartridges will last longer before needing to be replaced.

Another way to save money on printing prices is by opting to buy a mono printer. This can be a great way to reduce costs over time as you don’t need to factor colour ink cartridges into your running costs.

If you plan to buy a printer online, make sure you do your research. Ensure that it’s ideal for what you want to use it for and how often you need to print and don’t only look at the price of the printers. Check out the best value printers available to buy today from Cartridge People.

5. Utilise the Printer’s Modes

Here are some of the modes that your printer may feature that can lower your printing costs:

Eco-mode:

Another money-saving tip for printing is to utilise your printer’s eco mode if it has one. Eco-mode allows the printer to enter standby when not in use, saving energy and therefore money on power bills.

Draft Mode:

Printing in draft mode is faster and is also a great way to reduce printer ink consumption. Although printouts won’t be as high-quality as when you use the standard print mode, using draft mode for prints is ideal if you need to print a large amount of text. This ink-saving mode is definitely better suited to document printing than images, however.

6. Duplex Printing

Duplex printing just means using both sides of the page when printing. This way of printing is more environmentally friendly and saves both time and paper. By cutting down on the amount of paper you use, you won’t need to replace it as often and can again save money.

Additionally, many printers also support auto duplex printing. This means that you don’t need to manually turn over the page to print on the other side.

Double-sided printing can save money, is more convenient and also means less paper to organise into files and folders!

7. Formatting Changes to Save Money

When printing documents, you can also make small changes to its formatting in order to save ink and paper, and therefore money.

By lessening the margins on the page you can fit more text on a document and therefore reduce the amount of paper you need. Similarly, decreasing text size can also have the same effect. It should be noted however that this could impact readability, so it’s important to keep this in mind. Printing in mono, even if your printer supports colour printing, is another great way to cut costs.

This cost-effective printing guide has proven that printing doesn’t have to be expensive and that there are a multitude of ways to reduce costs. Cartridge People can help you to save money on printers, ink, toner and paper, making printing more affordable.