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	[quote name="Vidinfox "]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030156">If you ever wanted to collect the names of a few dozen corporate booklickers, now is your lucky day. </a> HP is disabling ink cartridges when you cancel your subscription to them. The webshits coming out in droves to defend this, because, for the worthless startups they all work for, this is the goal. [quote] mynameisvlad 10 minutes ago \| root \| parent \| prev \| next [–] “HP Instant Ink” is the name of the product. When we use “Windows” we don’t complain that they’re not real windows. When we use a Mac, we don’t complain that it’s not real Macintosh apples. It’s just a name. As the parent commenter says, you pay explicitly for a quota of printed pages, not ink or anything else. Therefore, they do define a price per page, anywhere from 10c on their cheapest plan down to 3.57c on their most expensive. Is it a shitty practice? Certainly. But you explicitly dont pay for ink, regardless of the name of the product. [/quote] That might be the stupidest comment I have ever seen in my life on hn, and that is saying something. [quote]hmatt 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [–] Its not like im a fan of the plan (i opted out and buy my own ink) but HP is right Its super easy to be on a "heavy" plan, get 10 ink cartridges, then cancel the first month and use that ink for a year. This causes HP to lose profits. They are betting that people don't really print as much as they think they do, most people are overpaying for their plan, and a small amount are actually using it up. Imagine if Netflix would let you KEEP your downloaded content after you stopped paying. Customers would pay for a month, download everything, cancel, then watch stuff throughout the year HP essentially created an optional netflix-style ink cartridge plan. As long as you pay you get unlimited cartridges. The second you stop paying you lose it all. No one is forcing you to opt in, but I know a lot of people who like the style even if they understand they're overpaying [/quote] Lots of "I'm not a fan, <i>but</i> from cowards [quote]kevincox 1 hour ago \| prev \| next [–] I think that HP does a lot of shady shit. But I actually think that this is fair. If you purchase a subscription for 100 pages/month or whatever you can't expect to cancel and keep printing for a while after you stop paying. I think it is reasonable that they provide both options. You can go with the subscription and you don't own the ink, but HP manages refilling and replacing as needed. Or you can buy your own ink and mange it yourself. I don't think that you can expect both. I do agree that it is a bit wasteful but unfortunately it isn't economical for them to retrieve the partially-used cartridges from cancelled subscriptions, so it is just thrown away. It would be interesting if they offered a "buy out" option. When you cancel the subscription with half an ink cartridge they could sell it to you for half of the price. If they allowed use of cartridges after the subscription expiry then the system could easily be abused by only subscribing for one month at a time to refill your cartridge then cancelling until you actually used it up. There are workarounds for this like minimum subscription length or blocking people based on address but they have other problems. The real shady shit is rejecting third-party cartridges, that should be illegal. It's your printer and you should be able to decide what ink you use. [/quote] It is absolutely unbelievable, except that is who the community is. There isn't a single terrible thing a company can't do that they won't go, "Well, ummmmmm" What a shithole of a site and community. [/quote]