For the past 4 years, I’ve owned 2 HP printers of the same model. One at home and one in the office. Setting up and maintaining printers is not everybody’s favorite task. But I am actually good at it. Plus, I need physical printouts around to not feel too depressed about our increasingly digital and disembodied world.
As the family’s main IT person, I troubleshoot printers all the time. Paper jam? I got it. Cartridge issue? No problem. WiFi network not connected? No worries I’ll print direct via the printers own wifi. I did this long before AI chatbots. Via this quaint old method called “googling”. And wayyy before that, “trials and errors”. (Remember those?)
Now if you own an HP printer any time in the past 5 years, you know that they have moved everything to an app, called HP Smart. Specifically, they push very hard on this feature called Instant Ink. As I understood it when I purchased the printers 4 years ago, the instant ink feature saves you money on cartridges and paper if you print relatively regularly. So I subscribed. 5 dollars a month for each printer.
Fast forward about a year later, I’ve gotten only 1 shipment of cartridges. “That’s odd” I thought. Shouldn’t these cartridges be delivered monthly? Or a regularity of some kind? Especially since I’ve paid monthly for them? In my head, it must have been a shipping problem. We have a lot of shipment issues from all sorts of vendors since we live in a remote mountain town. So I cancelled one of the subscriptions.
The monthly charges keep showing up in my credit cards. Annoyed, I asked my assistant to cancel them again. I think over the past 4 years, I’ve asked her to cancel HP subscriptions at least 4 times. Each time she had to go through an annoying process full of waiting around and calling clueless agents, both humans and AI alike. After many frustrated conversations, the charges finally stopped.
Now throughout this whole time, I kept on printing and occasionally troubleshooting the printers. Printers are janky and moody cretures. A little lint here and there could mess up the whole mechanics. But at this point I’ve familiarized myself with all the errors already. No problem.
Until the last troubleshoot session last week. The printer acted up like normal. So I did all the usual tricks.
I cleaned things. Removed cartridges. Reinstalled cartridges. Bought brand-new cartridges. Checked the carriage. Checked the rollers. Checked the parking mechanism.
The errors kept switching back and forth between E3 & E1. Then this mysterious E0.
Eventually, even the AI basically gave up and told me to buy a new printer.
Then I tried one final Hail Mary. I switched the home printer with the office printer. Thinking there must be some severe hardware defect with this one. I carried the “bad” one to the garage, readying it to be recycled.
And of course, that’s when it hit me. After 4 years, we stopped subscribing for the office printer in June, and for the home printer in September, just last week. Basically right when each printer stopped printing.
So I begrudgingly resubscribed to the lowest Instant Ink tier. And sure enough: The error disappeared. The printer printed.
"Instant ink? More like instant CHA CHING!" I thought to myself.
The Instant Ink cartridges sitting inside my printer were not really “my” cartridges in the normal sense.
HP’s own support documentation says that when you cancel Instant Ink, the subscription cartridges eventually stop working. To continue printing without the subscription, you have to remove them and install normal retail cartridges.
So, effectively:
I stopped paying the subscription, and HP remotely made the ink already sitting inside my printer unusable.
I had spent hours troubleshooting what looked exactly like a broken printer.
I was literally about to throw away a perfectly functioning printer.
And resubscribing “fixed” it.
Is there any other word for this frustrating user experience rather than "Dark Pattern"? I don't think so.
So that’s it you guys. Everything costs money forever now. And if it doesn’t now, it will certainly in do in the future (stop over relying on those “free” AI chat bots, that’s a lie!)
There’s no such thing as a free piano (that’s a story for another day). And similarly, there’s no such thing as a fixed priced printer.
capitalism sucks. sigh.