I recently purchased an HP SmartInk printer, not realizing I am now tied, ball & chain, to a subscription service just to use the product.
I recently purchased an HP printer on Amazon. When searching for printers, I found a good number of them, all with similar features and a feature comparison table that feels extraneous to the average consumer who is just looking to print ink on paper. After a 4.2 rating, I decided to purchase the HP DeskJet 4133e All-in-One Printer — caveat “with Bonus 6 Months of Instant Ink”.
I should have read more into the “6 months of Instant Ink” bit — to me as a consumer who isn’t going to spend his whole day reading every nook and cranny of the Amazon product page — I assumed this meant we have access to that much ink for the use of the average person. However I didn’t realize I was going to be duped by a subscription service.
When I finished using my first ink cartridge, I went to the second one (part of the 6 months free supply) and found that I was unable to use this ink cartridge unless I had a subscription service activated. Apparently these are a special set of ink cartridges that will activate to print if you’re paying a monthly subscription. The worst part, is how they tier their subscriptions. The lowest monthly payment is $1.49/month, for TEN PAGES of printing a month. If you go over that amount, you will be billed $1.00 for the next 10 pages in that month.
For a person who is looking to buy a printer (and hasn’t purchased one in over 10 years), you can sense the amazement I had when you can’t just buy a printer to print a page for you, without being held hostage to a monthly subscription fee. As a customer, I feel duped and cheated.
It isn’t as though HP is a monicker brand, but they were reputable enough to earn my trust. However now as a consumer I am wondering why I even paid for a printer if I’m continuing to pay for each page I have to print. Because of how little I print, I would have preferred to not buy a printer, save space in my house, and instead just go to the UPS Store or FedEx to print individual pages. It may be a little more expensive, but at least these are costs I am fully aware of during the point of sale.
And that’s the primary issue with this product experience — as a customer you expect the nature of your relationship with the product to be clear from the beginning. Good products do this, which is why customers have heartburn from all the freemium and trial offerings they experience with most products they interact with. Sure VCs love a subscription model because of its recurring revenue, but as a customer we would prefer not to have to project future usage of a product for an undetermined period of time.
The writing is on the wall: Don’t trick your customers and DEFINITELY do not hold them hostage.