A printer subscription charges you by the page whether or not you print. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why a plan that looks cheap in the first month can end up costing more than the printer did. Everything in this section is a machine you feed yourself, with supplies you buy outright and keep.
What to buy first, if you want the short answer
There are only two honest answers, and which one is right depends on one number: how many pages you print in a month.
- You print color, or more than about forty pages a month. Buy a refillable ink tank printer. The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 and the Canon MegaTank G3270 are the two we keep coming back to, and both run at a fraction of a cent a page.
- You print black text, rarely, in bursts. Buy a mono laser. The Brother HL-L2460DW costs roughly ten times as much per page as a tank printer and it will still be the cheaper machine for you, because toner does not dry out and a neglected inkjet can clog.
That is the genuinely useful division, and it is not the one most roundups make. Most sort printers by price. Sorting by how often you print is what actually predicts which one you will be happy with in two years.
How this category divides
“No subscription” sounds like one thing. In practice there are three different products hiding inside the phrase, and they behave completely differently once you own them.
Ink tank printers
Sold as EcoTank by Epson, MegaTank by Canon and Smart Tank by HP. You pour ink from bottles into reservoirs built into the printer. There is no cartridge, so there is no chip for firmware to reject, and the cost per page drops to somewhere near a third of a cent. The trade-off is a higher sticker price and the ordinary inkjet caveat: print heads want to be used occasionally.
Mono lasers
Toner powder instead of liquid ink. No color, much higher cost per page, and completely immune to the problem that kills most home inkjets — you can ignore a laser for four months and it will print perfectly on the fifth. See whether laser printers dry out for the full version of that answer.
Cartridge inkjets without a plan
Every cartridge inkjet can be run without a subscription. We rarely recommend one anyway, because the cost per page is the worst of the three by a wide margin and because the cartridge is where ink lock-out lives. If you want that route, read which printers accept third-party ink first.
What actually decides what you pay
Sticker price is the number on the box and it is close to irrelevant. The number that matters is sticker price plus supplies over the years you own the machine, and supplies usually win. A $90 cartridge printer whose ink costs twenty cents a page is more expensive than a $240 tank printer before you have printed two thousand sheets.
| Printer type | Roughly, per page |
|---|---|
| Mono laser | around 5 to 8 cents a page |
| Color laser | between 12 and 15 cents a page |
| Cartridge inkjet, black | about 7.5 cents a page |
| Cartridge inkjet, color | about 20 cents a page |
| Refillable ink tank | under a cent on every model we priced — see the figures on each page |
The first four ranges are Toner Buzz’s published figures, read on 27 September 2026. They are that publisher’s numbers, not measurements of ours. The ink tank row is our own arithmetic on supply prices and rated yields, and every page that uses a figure shows its inputs. How we work this out.
Three things then move the number on top of the supply cost. Automatic two-sided printing halves your paper bill and quietly matters more than people expect. High-yield supplies are almost always cheaper per page than standard ones, so buying the small cartridge to save money is usually the expensive choice. And color, on anything that is not a tank printer, costs several times what black does.
The mistake nearly everyone makes
Buying the cheapest printer on the shelf. Printer hardware is frequently sold at or below cost, and the money is made back on supplies, so the cheapest box in the store is very often the most expensive machine to own. The second mistake is subtler: buying a tank printer and then printing four pages a month. At that volume you will never recover the extra sticker price, and you have bought the one technology that dislikes being left alone.
What “no subscription” does and does not protect you from
Avoiding a plan removes the monthly charge and the page allowance. It does not automatically mean you can use any ink you like. Those are two separate things and they get conflated constantly. HP’s Dynamic Security checks cartridges for an authorized chip on printers that have no subscription attached at all. Meanwhile Brother has publicly denied blocking third-party toner after allegations to the contrary. If keeping your options open on supplies is the actual goal, the Ink Freedom section is the one to read, not this one.
And if you are leaving a plan right now, start with how to cancel HP Instant Ink — particularly the part about what happens to the cartridges you already have in the machine.
