How do you use a printer without a subscription?
Decline the plan when the setup wizard offers it, and buy ink or toner outright instead. No printer sold today requires a subscription in order to print. If you are already enrolled, cancel it and keep using the printer with cartridges you buy. The permanent fix is a bottle-fed tank printer, which has no cartridge to authenticate.
This question gets asked by two different people. One is standing over a new printer being asked to create an account, and wants to know whether saying no will break anything. The other has been paying monthly for a while and wants out. Both answers are straightforward, and the second one has a complication worth knowing about in advance.
What a printer subscription actually is
A supplies subscription is a billing arrangement, not a technical requirement. You pay monthly, the manufacturer ships ink or toner when the printer reports it is low, and the plan usually carries a monthly page allowance with charges above it. That is the whole product.
| Brand | Plan | Required to print? | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| HP | Instant Ink | No | Marketed across its printer range |
| Epson | ReadyPrint | No | Its cartridge printers, not EcoTank |
| Brother | Refresh EZ Print | No | Optional on the models we cover |
| Canon | None we found at purchase | — | — |
Recorded against each product in our registry from manufacturer pages read on 27 September 2026. Policies change and we re-verify them quarterly. 'No' means the printer prints with supplies bought outright.
Note what is not in that table: any row where the answer is yes. The reason this search exists is not that printers require plans — it is that the setup flow makes enrolling the path of least resistance, and that one brand’s firmware has separately restricted which cartridges a printer will accept. We go brand by brand on both questions here.
If you are setting up a new printer
- Skip the account if it is skippable. On most setup flows there is a “continue without” or “set up later” option, often in smaller type than the button beside it. Taking it does not reduce what the printer will do.
- Install the driver rather than the suite. Manufacturers offer a full software bundle and, usually, a plain driver. The plain driver prints and scans without an account.
- Decline the trial. A free trial of a supplies plan enrolls you in the plan. If you do not intend to keep it, declining now is simpler than canceling in three months.
- Buy one spare supply early. The quickest way to end up back on a plan is to run out of ink the night before something is due. One cartridge or one set of bottles in a drawer removes that pressure.
- Turn off automatic firmware updates if you plan to use compatible cartridges. This is the precaution How-To Geek recommended and it costs you nothing.
If you are already on a plan
- Cancel through the account, not the printer. Plans are managed in the manufacturer’s web account. We wrote the HP version up step by step in how to cancel HP Instant Ink.
- Buy a cartridge before you cancel. Plan cartridges can stop working when the plan ends, so have a retail one in the house first.
- Expect the plan cartridge to stop. This is the complication. Owners have found that the cartridges shipped under a plan are refused once the plan is over — what to do when the printer will not print afterwards.
- Then just buy supplies. That is the whole ongoing routine. A high-yield cartridge or a set of bottles, bought when the printer says it is low.
One thing to be clear about: canceling a plan does not brick a printer. It can brick the specific cartridges the plan sent you, which is a different and much smaller problem, solved by a cartridge from a shop.
Using third-party ink and toner instead
Compatible cartridges are the other half of how people avoid paying manufacturer prices, and the picture is genuinely mixed. HP’s Dynamic Security has rejected third-party cartridges on its cartridge-based printers, and PCWorld reported that HP offered firmware for some models that removes the restriction. Brother was accused of something similar in 2025 and denied it directly.
Our position is that compatibles are a reasonable way to save money and a poor foundation for a long-term plan, because the mechanism that can withdraw them is in the printer rather than in your control. The two pages that set this out properly are printer DRM explained and which printers accept third-party ink.
What you actually give up by not subscribing
- Supplies arriving automatically. A real convenience, replaced by keeping one spare in a drawer.
- A predictable monthly figure. Also real — and replaceable with a cost per page you can calculate yourself. That is what our calculator is for.
- Occasionally, a lower price at very low volumes. If you print a dozen pages a month, a cheap plan can beat buying cartridges. At tank-printer cost per page it cannot.
What you do not give up is any printing function. No feature of the hardware is reserved for subscribers on the printers we cover, and the full set of models that need no plan is in our main section.