The printer isn’t the expensive part.

You need a printer. You go online, sort by price, and the cheapest one that looks halfway decent wins. It turns up a few days later in a box that seems oddly large for what's inside, you plug it in, and you don't think about it again.

Then a few months later, the ink light comes on. You look up a replacement cartridge and do a double take at the price. Sometimes it's two cartridges, because the machine refuses to print at all with one of them empty. Add them up, and sometimes they cost more than the printer did.

That's not bad luck. It's the plan working exactly as intended.

Most consumer printer makers don't really make their money selling printers. The printer is priced to get you in the door—sometimes close to cost, sometimes at an outright loss—because once you own it, you're locked into whatever ink or toner system that specific model takes. That's where the actual money is made. It's the same logic as a razor priced cheap so the blades sell. None of this is a secret, exactly. It's just easy to forget in the moment you're comparing two boxes on a shelf, because the only number in front of you is the one on the sticker.

What that looks like in real numbers

We worked this out properly for one comparison recently—a fairly ordinary small-office printing volume, around 1,500 black-and-white pages and 500 colour pages a month, over five years.

Two decent printers. One, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3302fdw, costs £480 to buy. Over five years at that volume, its ink comes to £14,183.

The other, the Epson EcoTank ET-5850, costs £1,060 to buy—almost double. Its ink over the same five years comes to £521.

Add purchase price and ink together, and the "cheaper" printer ends up costing £13,082 more once you actually use it. Spread across five years, that's roughly £218 a month you didn't budget for. That's not a rounding error. That's most of a car.

To be fair, that gap is specific to that volume of printing. If you print a dozen pages a week, none of this really applies to you—buy whichever one you like the look of and keep the difference, because you'll barely dent the ink either way. The gap only turns serious once printing becomes a regular habit rather than an occasional thing.

What's actually worth checking before you buy

The single biggest factor is whether a printer uses a refillable ink tank or standard cartridges. Tank printers cost more upfront, sometimes a lot more, but you're buying ink in bottles instead of small plastic cartridges with a chip in them, and the cost per page usually drops by a wide margin. If you print with any regularity, a tank printer tends to win within a year or two, even from a higher starting price.

If you're staying with a cartridge printer, check whether it takes "XL" or high-capacity versions. The cartridges that ship in the box with a new printer are almost always the smallest size made—sometimes good for barely a few dozen pages—specifically to get you buying ink again within weeks. The XL versions cost more each, but they're usually far cheaper per page.

And be honest with yourself about how much colour you actually need. Plenty of people buy a colour printer for the one time a year they print something in colour, then pay a colour-capable premium on every cartridge for years afterwards. If almost everything you print is black text, a mono printer—or a colour one you can run in black-only mode without triggering the colour cartridges—will save you real money over time.

There's also the question of third-party or "compatible" cartridges, which are usually much cheaper than the manufacturer's own ink. They're a legitimate way to close some of that gap, and plenty of people use them for years without a problem. But quality varies a lot between suppliers, some manufacturers treat them as grounds to refuse a warranty repair, and a handful of printer models are built to reject anything that isn't official ink outright. Worth checking before you buy, not after the printer starts rejecting cartridges you've already paid for.

None of this needs to be complicated. It's mostly just remembering to ask what you'll be buying every few months, not only what you're buying today.

If you'd rather not do the arithmetic yourself, that's more or less what the calculator on Real Receipt is for—purchase price plus the ink or toner you'd realistically get through, based on your own printing volume. It won't tell you what to buy. It'll just show you the number the shop listing leaves out.

Either way, that's the number worth two minutes of your time before you order anything.

Calculation note: the comparison includes purchase price and proportional replacement ink or toner. Energy, paper, starter supplies, repairs and unverified maintenance remain excluded. Prices are dated UK observations rather than live retailer feeds.