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HP Printer The Almighty Buck

HP Remotely Disables a Customer's Printer Until He Joins Company's Monthly Subscription Service (twitter.com) 323

Posted by msmash from the capitalism-baby dept.
A Twitter user's complaint last week in which he produces photo evidence of HP warning him that his ink cartridges would be disabled until he starts paying for HP Instant Ink monthly subscription service has gone viral on the social media.

Ryan Sullivan, the user who made the complaint, said he only discovered the warning after cancelling a random HP subscription -- which charged him $4.99 a month -- after "over a year" of the billing cycle. "Cartridge cannot be used until printer is enrolled in HP Instant Ink," Sullivan was informed by an error message.
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HP Remotely Disables a Customer's Printer Until He Joins Company's Monthly Subscription Service More

HP Remotely Disables a Customer's Printer Until He Joins Company's Monthly Subscription Service

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  • Take it back to the store for an refund and (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:25AM (#59637462)

    Take it back to the store for an refund and ask them to show you the EULA before you buy.

    • Yes, let's look at the agreement (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:55AM (#59637612)

      If more people had read about the actual agreement before making knee-jerk comments here, they'd look a bit less foolish.

      This guy was already on a subscription, and the terms were X pages per month (not what was on those pages or how much ink it used).

      He chose to cancel that subscription, and so he didn't get any more pages. Technically, he might also be required to return the spare ink.

      He always had the option to buy regular ink cartridges instead, but chose not to.

      You can think whatever you want about that sort of subscription plan, but it doesn't seem like anything wasn't completely clear up-front here or like there's anything shady or illegal going on. We also have no idea how much this person might have gained from being on that plan until this point.

      • Re:Yes, let's look at the agreement (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kingbilly ( 993754 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:20PM (#59637762)
        Yeah I actually saw this on Twitter yesterday, being retweeted from people I always assumed knew a thing or two about computers. While HP is no saint, I was surprised someone could be so confused that they 1) joined a subscription service without knowing it and 2) were appalled that a subscription service would cease when you stop paying for it.

        One employee at our company used HP Instant Ink. You pay by the print instead of by the cartridge. You don't purchase ink, instead the printer automatically pings HP to mail you some more ink when it senses it will run out. If you cancel the service, the printer will reject the ink after a while. It seems fair since you never bought the ink to begin with.

        You shouldn't use the service if you don't understand it. We understood it, and for one employee who printed in color the most, it made sense until we got into other solutions.

        How does someone in the IT sector not understand subscription models? How were they so surprised that they needed to tweet about it? I expect that from my parents. Not this industry. And again, HP is no saint and ink is terribly overpriced.

        • Re:Yes, let's look at the agreement (Score:4, Insightful)

          by account 156 ( 6542644 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:58PM (#59637964)
          If you design business models in a way that the payments are completely detached from the actual costs, people will (justifiably) take issue with that, no matter how clearly you spell out the rules. It's the same with ISP data volume limits and overage charges.

          • Re:Yes, let's look at the agreement (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday January 20, 2020 @01:15PM (#59638034)

            payments are completely detached from the actual costs

            Rent! Rent! Everyone wants to suckle up to that golden teat of money for nothing over time which is rent. Costs be damned, it's TIME that is money! Now pay your rent.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by rednip ( 186217 )

            I did sign up for instant ink, while I'm still on my first round of cartridges, it cost me $2 in nearly a year. I'm on the $0 dollar plan which gives 15 pages per month. When I go over that the next pages cost $1 for each pack of 10, pages remaining are included in the 'rollover' (my account says 7 left in rollover). I so very rarely use my printer that this is perfect. Considering that when buying ink cartridges a'la carte people are paying 3 to 6 cents a page for black, at least twice as much for col

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Buying and using regular ink cartridges doesn't disable the warning. OTOH, while the threat has been posting on my printer for over a year, the printer remains functional, as long as I cancel the dialog each time I print.

        OTOH, I don't have my printer hooked up to the internet. Perhaps if I did, things would have turned out differently.

      • Even if you can decode more than half of it, it is the mother of all underhanded lying by omission and implication.

        They WILL go "But it was meant in THAT way that is *completely non-obvious* until you are told it. Didn't you read it?
        "Oh, and we didn't say your child would NOT be taken away to a Vatican rape farm!"
        "Oh you will go to court? You and what army of lawyers? Cause we got one. And people who think like us will be the judges too. ... Suuure you will go to court. lol"

        So people like you, with this typ

    • Re:Take it back to the store for an refund and (Score:5, Interesting)

      by carnivore302 ( 708545 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:27PM (#59637816) Journal

      Or much simpler: Go to setup -> system setup -> supplies -> cartridge policy, set it to 'off' instead of 'authorized HP'.

      Done.

  • There's the HP I used to know and love, certainly not shaking down customers to belay it's entire death as a technical company! /s

    • Re:Quality! (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:58AM (#59637624)
      The HP you knew and loved was the "test and measurement division" that was spun off to form Agilent. The HP that was left behind was/is a greedy tech company that lost the concept of innovation and quality. So they no seem to survive by a forced lock-in (a.k.a., subscription services) of customers.
      • They were great, but the HP that made the LaserJet 4+ I had was a pretty damned good company, too. I'm pretty sure someone's still using it. Aftermarket parts are reasonably priced, not that you need to replace them very often. It just prints and prints and prints... I added a PostScript board, maxed out the RAM, and put in Ethernet.

    • Re:Quality! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday January 20, 2020 @01:17PM (#59638036)
      I knew something like this was going to happen the moment I noticed that you had to input the numbers into their calculators in a funny way.

  • Instant Ink is Proof HP is broken (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bit trollent ( 824666 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:28AM (#59637472) Homepage

    I actually considered signing up for Instant Ink thinking that it would actually solve a real need. It would be great to automatically receive ink when I'm running low. I'd even be willing to pay a bit extra for the convenience.

    Then I realized that it's a crazy subscription service which tells you how many "pages" you can print per month.. and bills you even if you didn't print a single page or need any ink.

    Seriously... what an abject scam from a once great company.

    • Re:Instant Ink is Proof HP is broken (Score:5, Insightful)

      by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:41AM (#59637536)
      companies will basically do anything to get recurring revenue these days. including selling their souls and tarnishing a name that was once respected.

    • Re:Instant Ink is Proof HP is broken (Score:5, Interesting)

      by smoot123 ( 1027084 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:51AM (#59637578)

      I actually considered signing up for Instant Ink thinking that it would actually solve a real need....

      Ditto. I bought a new HP printer a year or so ago. I thought the prospect of "ink just sorta shows up on time" sounded great. The details, not so much.

      Thing is, the headline seems misleading. HP didn't disable the printer, they disabled the cartridge. I expect he buys another cartridge (at normal retail prices), he's good to go. That was the deal: the monthly fee ensured he always had ink available up to N pages. Stop paying and he has no right to the ink any more. It doesn't matter where the ink is physically located.

      BTW, this is pretty common in enterprise hardware and software in general. I've worked at several companies where we ship hardware which sits idle until you pay a license. In storage companies it's common to ship extra disks (because you need them for performance) but not let you use the full capacity of the disk until you buy a license. When you install freemium software, there's probably only one binary. The software you installed can do anything. It just refuses until you pay a fee.

      That being said, it does seem petty to disable a working cartridge. Fer cryin' out loud HP, just let it go. The extra $40 (or whatever HP's cut is) isn't worth the bad press.

      • Re:Instant Ink is Proof HP is broken (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jythie ( 914043 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:59AM (#59637630)
        *nod* this really strikes me as HP trying to take a system that corporate users are already comfortable with and trying to sell it to home users where expectations are a bit different. Home users are REALLY big into the idea that once they have a bit of hardware in their physical hands it is 100% theirs, no matter what deal they bought it under.

      • Re:Instant Ink is Proof HP is broken (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kingbilly ( 993754 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:24PM (#59637784)
        Yes, headline is bullshit. The printer will work with any other ink, including ink from HP. It just won't work with certain chipped ink, which was chipped that way because the subscription model doesn't have the customer buying the ink. So this isn't the case of something I bought stopped working. Is the ink industry evil? Sure. But who in this industry hasn't heard of subscription models? The person that started all this is the founder of WP Site Care (https://www.wpsitecare.com/plans/) which sells support contracts. Are you telling me if a customer of his stops paying, that he doesn't discontinue the service?
      • But they shouldn't be disabling the cartridge, just not sending any replacements.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          But they shouldn't be disabling the cartridge, just not sending any replacements.

          And here's why they don't do that:

          • Customer subscribes to HP Instant Ink.
          • HP sends a cartridge.
          • Customer cancels the subscription before the free initial period.
          • HP is out $30. Customer has an ink cartridge.
          • When the customer runs out of ink, repeat.

          This approach is an easy way to thwart that kind of abuse. The only real alternative I can think of would involve charging the prorated value of the current ink cartridge as a cancell

    • I imagine that there was some bright MBA-type who sold the subscription model on the fact that people would just sign up for the service and forget about it, and not even notice the line charge on their credit card statement since it was generally below their level of "I Care" ($5 is really a small sum in the scheme of things). If it really provided a service, like shipping an ink cartridge to you at a discounted retail price before your old one gave out, then it might be worth it.

    • I actually considered signing up for Instant Ink thinking that it would actually solve a real need. It would be great to automatically receive ink when I'm running low. I'd even be willing to pay a bit extra for the convenience.

      Then I realized that it's a crazy subscription service which tells you how many "pages" you can print per month.. and bills you even if you didn't print a single page or need any ink.

      Seriously... what an abject scam from a once great company.

      It depends on your usage. For our (moderate, home) usage, it actually saves us money over buying the crazy expensive cartridges the normal way.

      YMMV, but it is better for some people.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crath ( 80215 )
      If you regularly print, this subscription will save you a lot of money on ink costs. If you rarely print, then it won't save you anything--as you mention. But, keep in mind that there are lots of folks (like me) who own a printer because they need to print on a regular basis, and this subscription is the cheapest way to buy HP ink.

  • Right to repair laws can fix this Just think if an car had an forced dealer maintenance plan and if you did not buy your car stopped working.

    • Tesla is working on this as we speak...

    • Re:Right to repair laws can fix this Just think i (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jythie ( 914043 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:50AM (#59637572)
      I am not sure right to repair would really apply here. The guy got discounted cartridges that only worked if they were used in a printer registered with the program. Such laws really are not intended to cover 'want to keep using leased/subscription based things after stopping payment'.

      • Indeed. I'm all for right to repair, people actually owning things they think they've bought, and so on. That's not the same as prohibiting any sort of temporary arrangement, and many people do benefit from those kinds of arrangements depending on their situation and preferences.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          I'm all for right to repair, people actually owning things they think they've bought, and so on. That's not the same as prohibiting any sort of temporary arrangement

          Would you at least favor prohibiting companies from deliberately making non-temporary arrangements cost-prohibitive?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            What would that even look like though? Generally such things only look cost prohibitive because all the cost is being paid up front, which when compared to the amortized version looks really high. If you did try to implement such a restriction, you would somehow have to prove that the up front cost is somehow unreasonable?

    • Re:Right to repair laws can fix this Just think i (Score:5, Insightful)

      by crath ( 80215 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:30PM (#59637834) Homepage
      Right to repair has nothing to do with this particular issue. The user who tweeted about his printer not working, can immediately rectify the situation by visiting the store and buying new cartridges that weren't given to him as part of the subscription service. The fact that the Twitterverse is enraged about this issue simply reveals the Internet's low IQ.

  • When its a huge company shaking you down.

  • Solution is really simple: Do not buy HP printers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:39AM (#59637524)

    This HP is not the company it used to be a long time ago. Today, it is just another evil profit-monster that cares nothing about its customers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dstyle5 ( 702493 )
      That is why I recently took my HP Printer in for recycling. Never buying their products again.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bobby ( 109046 )

      I know this would be far overreaching govt., but your post made me think that a company like HP should not be allowed to keep using a once great name when they do crap like this.

      The sad irony is that the once great HP became Agilent, now "Keysight", which most people would have no clue who they are or what they make. I don't own nor have used any Keysight products, but they're probably among the best you can buy.

      Capitalism doesn't work as advertised. Economic theory says that HP's customers would flee and

      • The problem with capitalism is that it assumes that everyone have or starts with equal conditions and opportunities, which is completely false. You expect "free markets" and "freedom of choice" but what you get is monopolies, combined prices, laws bought by the big enterprises and every kind of fraud you can imagine.

        Granted, it can work if you have a government that is firm in regulating and enforcing the rules (no company can be "too big to fail" when it abuses the rules), but the first thing that every

    • HP is a Victim of Management School Ideology (Score:5, Insightful)

      by catchblue22 ( 1004569 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:57PM (#59637954) Homepage

      HP is a textbook example of how the business school "MBA cult" has ruined American business. They have turned a once brilliant creative company like Hewlett Packard and changed it into a cheap brand name for shitty peripherals. Boeing is another excellent example of what MBA's do. Funny thing is that even when MBA's screw up, they just keep hiring clones of themselves. Notice that at Boeing they fired the one actual engineer from the board, while keeping everyone else.

      Some counter-examples of successful companies that haven't followed the playbook of the MBA cult: Apple (under Steve Jobs at least), SpaceX, and Tesla (both under Elon Musk). If you truly want to "make America great again", stop hiring so many MBA's to the boards of companies.

  • Since this sounded bizarre, I looked up this "service." Apparently the idea is that you pay a subscription fee, and then HP sends you new cartridges when your current ones are running low.

    Not something I'd be interested in, but it sounds like something that some people could use.

    Disabling someone's printer if they cancel the service, on the other hand, is obviously shady as hell. If you stop subscribing to the service, then they should stop sending you new cartridges.

    On the other hand, if this dude didn't

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      That is a good point. Was the guy getting cartilages in the mail once a month and not putting 2 and 2 together? Or is the original outrage a bit dishonest?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bobby ( 109046 )

      Disabling someone's printer if they cancel the service, on the other hand, is obviously shady as hell. If you stop subscribing to the service, then they should stop sending you new cartridges>

      More and more major software is this way- you no longer "own" your software- you're paying an ongoing fee to use it. It won't even start unless it's online and properly paid up.

      I think it's horrible, but people are accepting this model, and corporations have no conscience or ethics, so why not do it with hardware?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      They didn't disable his printer, they disabled the ink cartridge that he received under the subscription plan. When you sign up for the service, you subscribe to a certain number of pages per month. The price you pay is determined by that, and is obviously based on how long they think a cartridge will last with that usage. If he was paying $4.99/month, they he is on the '100 pages per month' plan. Maybe they figure at that rate of usage, a cartridge wlil last 3 months (for example). So in the first mon

  • Wait, so he signed up for a subscription service, and was surprised when the thing stopped working when he canceled?

    Ok, I get that people get upset over ink and the printer market, and I think there is a lot of room for discussing just how big a rip off this particular 'deal' is, but I thing getting outraged at canceling a subscription to a discount program somehow not resulting in continued use of the discount product is a bit misplaced.

    That is just how subscriptions and leases work.

    • Re:Subscription Service? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:58AM (#59637628)
      Right? As much as I'd like to hate on HP here, as their ink prices are ridiculous, I don't feel as though they are in the wrong here. Obviously we don't have the fully story here... Are the cartridges being disabled ones that were shipped to him as part of this subscription program? If they are, then HP has every right to turn them off. Now, if these are the carts that came with the printer, it's a little more of a grey area. Still shitty, but kind of what we've come to expect from consumer printers. If these are carts that he bought from a retailer and HP is disabling them, I'd tend to side more with the dude.

    • "Canceled a random charge" ... social media outrage.

      It's not surprising these days but it's still disappointing that this gets traction rather than everybody just saying "dumbass" in a Red Forman voice.

      I am not going to even go find the comments saying that a basic level of ink supply should be a human right.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        Eh, it fits into an existing conflict within the tech community, so not surprised it would get traction. The issue of wanting to be able to convert discount priced things to their full price counterpart is a near religious issue with a good chunk of people, and on the other extreme 'individual buyer beware, anything that profits is ethical' is another near religious issue, so stories that can get both camps going can blow up.

    • The ink is already in his printer. That's like cancelling your coffee of the month club and they come to your house and take away what beans you already have.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        The ink is the subscription device. Analogies aside, that is the thing he was paying for, he stopped paying, so it stopped working.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        No, in the coffee of the month club you subscribed to getting a certain amount of coffee each month. In this plan, you subscribe to printing a certain number of pages in a month. You do NOT subscribe to getting a cartridge a month. In the coffee of the month club, when you stop paying you stop receiving coffee. In this plan, when you stop paying you stop being able to print pages. Exactly the same.

  • The guy HAD a subscription and canceled it, so HP disabled his ability to use the cartridge in his printer.

    • Re:Clickbait headline (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dwillden ( 521345 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:54AM (#59637606) Homepage
      And that's a problem, he'd paid for that cartridge over time. His ending the subscription should only result in his not getting a replacement when the current cartridge runs dry.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by crath ( 80215 )
        Under the service, you pay for ink as you use it; i.e., you don't prepay for ink through the purchase of an entire cartridge. So, since he hasn't yet paid for the unused ink in the cartridge, it has been disabled.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        Unless he signed up for a plan that was far greater than what his actual needs were, he did not 'pay for it over time'. You get the first cartridge when you sign up for the service. If you are on the $4.99/month plan as he was, you have only paid $4.99 for the cartridge, which is not the full price of the cartridge. By the time you have paid off the cartridge, it wlil be time to get a new one, and the cycle starts over.

        For it to work like you suggest, you would not receive a cartridge at all until after

    • Not sending more ink would have been appropriate. Disabling the printer, unless it was free as part of the deal, not appropriate.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        The thing you sign up for is the ability to print a certain number of pages in a month. You are NOT subscribing to some sort of 'cartridge of the month' service. The cartridges are just sent to enable you to do the printing you paid for. When you stop paying, you lose access to the thing you paid for, in this case - the ability to print.

        The printer is not disabled, the cartridge is. He can BUY a cartridge and his printer will work.

  • Extortion (Score:3)

    by LostOne ( 51301 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @11:51AM (#59637580) Homepage

    How is this not extortion?

    No, don't answer that with a legal dissertation on the definition of extortion, etc. I do know how they get away with this sort of thing. It's a fundamental flaw in the way we have our laws set up in parts of the world.

  • Instant Ink sounds great, but I don't need cartridges. I need ribbons for my dot matrix printer.

  • So, if this is all based on some subscription service, did he actually have the buy the printer and ink cartridge before being able to use them?

    If I subscribe to any magazine, I don't need to spend money on a printing press first before I get the issue and can start reading it.

  • Cancel a subscription service and amazingly it stops. The real mistake here was buying an HP printer, or any printer for that matter, where cartridges are chipped to prevent you using your own refills. This subscription thing seems to be a natural extension of DRMd carts.
  • We need to understand it is not the company's responsibility to treat customers fairly. Treating customers fairly is just one of the many ways the company can make money. It is a legal requirement for the board of directors to appoint executives who will extract maximum profit. It is called the fiduciary responsibility. They are legally bound, and they can be sued if they hire executives who put the customers' interest above the company interest. If it can make more money by entrapping customers by confusin
  • They don't pull this shit and their printers are better anyhow.

  • Check The Terms - and there are alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mikeebbbd ( 3690969 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @12:27PM (#59637812)

    Almost every printer maker has some kind of subscription plan that lets them monitor your ink use and send new cartridges when needed. Or was this the "Cloud Print" service which is separate (or so you thought)? Either way, that's more intrusion and surveillance that I don't need or want. Kind of a follow-on to HP using copyright on the disabling chips in the ink cartridges to prevent refilling.

    Anyway, it simply reinforces my decision to abandon HP, made many years ago. I currently have a Brother all-in-one inkjet that simply works, with ink cartridges big enough that (for black) I replace it about as often as my wife does for her laser printer, and for the same price I paid for ink in the previous HP I get at least double the number of pages. Oh yes, and the Brother has drivers for all major operating systems, including Windows from XP-10, most Mac versions within the last 10 years at least, and Linux. Unlike HP, which killed driver support for my printer when I moved to Windows 7 (XP only). Again, it just works, and the price is about the same or less than HP for a similar machine. I didn't get one of the others (Canon, Epson) at the time the HP died, but I understand that a lot of people like them too. There are alternatives to staying under HP's thumb.

  • The person tweeting founded a subscription service but apparently doesn't understand subscription services today. With HP Instant Ink, you don't buy the ink outright. For some people, they wind up paying less than they would have using the traditional model. This isn't for everyone, but I don't know how you can even work (or be the founder of a company) and deal with subscription models then act all surprised when it crosses from software into hardware.

    Despite what the headline says, the printer isn't disa
  • It isn't all over for HP until they start mass-mailing ink cartridges to everyone.

  • Inkjet printers ARE A SCAM (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday January 20, 2020 @02:21PM (#59638322) Journal
    It's 2020, people. Laser printers are cheap. Toner cartridges last longer and don't 'dry out' and get ruined. Most printing you do is monochrome anyway. Skip the inkjet crap and just get a laser printer instead.

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