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Ten Years of HP's Instant Ink
31 July 2025
We first wrote about HP's Instant Ink program when it was announced in September 2005. In May 2018, we bought an HP Envy 5055 all-in-one device. And signed up for the Instant Ink program.
A few days ago we replaced the cartridges in the Envy with new ones HP had sent us at no charge. So we thought we'd do a seven-year follow-up on the printer and ink program.
INSTANT INK
At the time we bought the printer, if you printed 15 or fewer pages a month, HP would send you free ink when the printer reported you need more. "With InstantInk, your printer reports over the Internet the number of pages you print each month," we wrote. "If you print 15 or less, ink is free. You get 10 more pages a month for $1. So 25 pages a month or 300 pages a year would be $12."
These days the free deal is gone. It's now $1.79/month if you print 15 or fewer pages a month. HP calculates the ink savings of its subscription service as 50 percent of buying them on demand.
And for 79 cents a month, you can now add HP paper to your subscription with Instant Paper. HP will automatically ship one to three reams of 20 lb. 96 Bright paper at a time to you. There's no an option for photo paper.
MAINTENANCE
HP still honors the old deal we signed up for in 2018, so the other day a fresh set of ink cartridges arrived. The printer had apparently ordered them.
We waited until the prints were unusable (although there's no reason to be so extreme), then we changed both cartridges so we wouldn't waste ay more paper.
The printer opens wide enough to get to the cartridges, which are clamped in position. It's all black plastic in there and we have the printer under a desk to seeing what we were doing was a challenge until we swung a lamp's light over the area.
After installing the cartridges, you have to align them. The printer prints a test sheet you scan on its scanner and it performs the alignment based on the scan, apparently. Or, perhaps, the scan merely confirms you installed the cartridges correctly.
In any case, you're done.
RECYCLE
Well, except for the old cartridges. In the box with the new ones, HP also includes a bag to mail the old cartridges back to them for recycling.
The only trouble with that, we learned, is the new mailbox design that only accommodates letters through its thin slot.
So we took it to the Post office and dropped it in their big open slot.
HICCUPS
We did have one little problem. We couldn't get the alignment page to print. We used the control panel on the printer to execute that function but nothing happened.
The solution is to turn the printer off for 30 seconds.
Once we restarted it, we were able to print the alignment page, scan it and get the thumbs up.
We've had other non-printer issues over the years we've had this printer. We do have an account we sign into on the HP site but we've had to simply call HP to resolve problems like non-functioning passwords or an email address change.
A few of those issues have been surprisingly complex to resolve but the HP support person always knew what to do and was able to untangle the knot we got tied up in.
Hiccups are, no dobut, inevitable but HP fortunately provides two levels of support to resolve them.
COLOR
It's a bit surprising to us how useful a color all-in-one device still is. We find we often need color copies of documents, although we try to get away with black-and-white laser prints (scanned with VueScan and sent to our Brother laser printer) if we can.
But we don't print photos on the HP. For that we resort to the dye sublimation prints the DNP DS-620A produces. Or we go big with the Epson R3000. But the HP faithfully reproduces color documents.
So we weren't surprised that the Instant Paper subscription does not include photo paper, only letter-sized reams.
DRIVER
We used to use Canon all-in-one devices, but let us warn you against them. Canon simply does not update its drivers to work with operating systems as they evolve. They'd rather you bought a new printer when you update macOS or Windows.
In contrast, we installed drivers for this WiFi-enabled HP Envy on a machine running macOS High Sierra (10.12) on Intel and it is now running on macOS Sequoia (15.5) on Apple Silicon.
CONCLUSION
That's a span of seven years during which the printer has remained compatible with whatever we were running. Outright prolonged applause.
That's seven years of free ink. No wonder that option is no longer available.