You signed a copier lease in 2019 because every office had a copier. Now half your team works from home, contracts get signed in DocuSign, and the machine in the corner mostly prints the occasional shipping label. The lease still bills $312 every month. The obvious question is whether you need the thing at all.
The honest answer is that some offices genuinely do not, and dealers will never tell you which ones. Here is how to find out where you sit.
Start With the Meter, Not Your Gut
Every copier keeps a lifetime page count. Print the meter report or ask your dealer for the last 12 months of billing. You are looking for average monthly pages, split between black and color.
Rough thresholds that hold up in practice:
Under 500 pages a month. You do not need a copier lease. A $400 desktop multifunction and retail toner will cost you around $25 to $40 a month all in. A lease at $150 minimum is throwing away $1,300 a year.
500 to 2,000 pages a month. Borderline. A bought workgroup MFP in the $900 to $1,800 range makes sense, especially if nothing you print is time critical. You lose same day service coverage, so ask yourself how bad a three day outage would be.
2,000 to 8,000 pages a month. Lease territory. At this volume consumables and repairs on a bought machine will exceed the lease payment, and desktop hardware fails early under the load. Expect $150 to $350 a month.
Over 8,000 pages a month. Lease with a real service agreement, no question. See our high volume copier lease pricing guide for what those tiers cost.
Page Count Is Not the Only Test
Volume tells you about printing. It says nothing about the other three things a multifunction does, and those are often the real reason the machine earns its keep.
Scanning at volume. If anyone in your office feeds stacks of paper into a scanner, a proper document feeder at 60 to 120 pages a minute is not replaceable by a phone app. Law offices, medical practices and title companies scan far more than they print. A $400 desktop unit with a 35 page feeder will make somebody miserable.
Finishing. Stapling, hole punch, booklet folding. If you assemble board packets, closing binders or student handouts, finishing options are worth the lease on their own. Buying a device that staples is expensive; leasing one is normal.
Security and audit trail. Regulated offices need user authentication at the device, encrypted hard drives and a verified wipe at end of term. Consumer hardware gives you none of that. Our guide to copier lease data security and drive wiping explains what to require in the contract.
If any one of those three matters to you, the answer is yes, you need a real machine, and leasing is usually the cheaper way to get one.
What Going Without Actually Costs
Offices that drop the copier rarely drop the cost to zero. They shift it.
A small firm doing 900 pages a month without a copier typically ends up with a $1,200 desktop MFP amortized over three years, around $33 a month, plus $45 a month in retail toner, plus roughly $60 a month sending oversized and bound jobs to a print shop. That is about $138. Against a $185 lease with service included, the savings are real but modest, maybe $560 a year, and you have traded away same day repair.
Where the savings get big is when the machine you have is badly oversized for what you do. Offices leasing a 55 page per minute production class device at $480 a month while printing 1,100 pages are common, usually because the sales rep sized for growth that never came. That office does not need to go copier free. It needs a smaller machine. Our notes on copier lease options when downsizing cover how to get out of an oversized unit.
What Most Guides Miss
The paperless argument almost always ignores who is generating the paper, and it is usually not you. It is your customers, your bank, your court system and your insurers.
You can digitize everything you produce and still receive a steady stream of paper that has to be scanned, indexed and stored. A small insurance agency that went fully digital internally still scanned 4,000 incoming pages a month, because carriers and clients kept mailing things. Their print volume fell 80 percent. Their scan volume went up. They still needed the machine, just a different one, with a fast duplex feeder and no finisher.
So before you cancel anything, run the numbers on both directions. Pull the device meter for prints and for scans separately, and note that scan pages usually cost nothing under a click contract because dealers bill prints, not scans. If scans are two thirds of your traffic, you are getting most of the machine's value for free and cancelling would be a mistake. Ask the dealer to requote you as a scan first office and watch the recommended model change completely.
If You Decide You Still Need One
Right size it to your real numbers, not to a growth story. Ask for a 36 month term rather than 60 if your volume is trending down, since a shorter term costs a bit more monthly but keeps you from being stuck. Check whether the quote includes a monthly minimum volume, because that is what turns a low usage office into an overpaying one. Our copier lease negotiation tips cover how to push back on both.
And if you decide you do not need one, cancel properly. Most copier leases require written notice 60 to 90 days before term end or they auto renew for another 12 months. Diarize that date the day you decide.
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