Tiered Pricing Will Save You Time and Money

Every business needs a printer, right?

When you work with a printing vendor, you typically operate within a pricing model that charges your business on a per-print basis. You’re paying for each page that is printed from your machine and for the amount of toner used. When you print a document in color, you pay more than when you print a document in standard black-and-white.

Because of this traditional pricing model, it can become apparent to business owners that printing costs have the potential to creep out of control. You may have employees printing in color when there’s no need to do so, or you may be unaware of the true printing needs of the business until it’s too late, and the bill is due.

Tiered pricing gives businesses a way to keep printing costs down.

In this pricing model, you pay based on the amount of color that is used per print. So, the less color a document uses, the less you pay for that document.

There are typically three tiers of printing: low coverage, medium coverage, and full coverage. A low coverage print would offer the lowest amount of color per document (and is therefore the cheapest), while full coverage would allow for a document to be printed entirely in color (and would come at the highest rate). Black-and-white documents are considered standard and aren’t included in this tiered pricing model.

How does it all work? Tiered pricing printers are designed to measure and record color usage. The printer detects the amount of toner that a printed document requires, and charges the business according to the pricing tier that quantity falls within.

This reduces the chance that a business will inadvertently make a color print and pay for full color when full color wasn’t used throughout the document. For example, let’s say that you print a document that’s just black text on a white background, but there’s one hyperlink that your word processor automatically places in blue. With some types of printers, that blue hyperlink alone will activate color processing and result in a full color charge. When there aren’t any tiers of pricing – it’s an all-or-nothing situation.

Research finds that the majority of businesses don’t use full color coverage anyway when they print. Rather, most printing conducted falls in the low to medium pricing tier, with some to minimal color present. That’s why tiered pricing just makes sense. Why pay for something that you normally do not use?

A tiered pricing model also empowers businesses to design with color usage in mind. Rather than apply color to creative materials without much intention, being cognizant of the relationship between color quantity and price can encourage your team to use color more strategically. Targets for each tier can be identified, so that the business knows what percentage of documents will fall within each tier throughout the month, quarter, or year. This type of strategy can be helpful for budgeting because it minimizes the chance of unexpected expense.

These are just some of the many benefits of selecting a printer with tiered pricing. To dig deeper into the advantages and learn how a tiered pricing printer could specifically benefit your business, reach out to the printing experts at Matthijssen Business Systems today.