Your copier lease is up in four months and someone on the team floats the idea of just sending everything to a print shop instead. No lease, no toner, no service calls, no machine taking up the corner. It sounds clean. Whether it saves money depends almost entirely on two numbers most offices never look up.
The Per Page Gap Is Bigger Than You Think
Under a typical copier lease with a click contract, you pay roughly $0.007 to $0.012 per black and white page and $0.05 to $0.08 per color page, on top of the monthly equipment payment. Print on demand and local print shops charge $0.06 to $0.12 per black page and $0.35 to $0.79 per color page for short runs, with online services landing at the lower end and walk in shops at the higher end.
So color costs roughly six to ten times more per page outsourced. Black and white costs eight to twelve times more. That gap is what the monthly lease payment is buying you.
The break even is straightforward. If your lease and service run $300 a month, and outsourcing costs you an extra $0.06 per black page, you need to be printing under about 5,000 black pages a month before outsourcing starts winning. Swap in color heavy work and the number collapses, because the per page gap on color is around $0.40. At that spread, 750 color pages a month already eats a $300 lease payment.
Our copier lease price per page breakdown has the current click rate ranges to plug into your own version of this.
The Cost Nobody Puts in the Spreadsheet
Outsourcing moves work from a machine to a person. Somebody has to prep the file, upload it, pick options, approve a proof, wait, then drive over or receive a delivery. Call it 25 minutes per job, honestly. At a $32 an hour loaded rate that is about $13 of staff time per job before a single page is printed.
An office sending out eight jobs a month is burning roughly $104 in labor. Twenty jobs a month is $260, which is a whole lease payment spent on errands. This is the number that flips most "we will just outsource it" plans back around within six months.
Turnaround is the other soft cost. In house you print now. Outsourced you get 24 to 72 hours standard, and rush pricing is typically 25 to 50 percent extra. If your business ever needs 40 copies of something in the next hour, you are keeping a machine regardless.
Where Outsourcing Genuinely Wins
There are jobs that never belong on an office copier, and paying a shop for them is just correct.
Anything over about 500 identical copies. Offset and production presses beat office equipment on both cost and quality above that point, and you are not putting 2,000 pages through a leased MFP without a service conversation.
Heavy stock, oversized, or special finishing. Card stock over 110lb, 11x17 booklets with saddle stitch, laminated menus, spiral binding. Your copier either cannot do it or will jam trying.
Once a year jobs. Annual reports, conference materials, holiday mailers. Buying capability you use twice a year is bad economics.
True color critical work. Brand color matching on marketing pieces. Office copiers drift; presses are calibrated.
The right answer for most offices is a hybrid. Lease a right sized machine for daily volume, outsource the four categories above. That combination almost always beats going all in on either side, and it is what most well run small firms actually do.
What Most Guides Miss
Outsourcing has a confidentiality cost that never shows up in a price comparison, and for some businesses it is disqualifying regardless of the math.
When you send a job to a print shop, your document sits on a third party server, gets viewed by prepress staff, prints in a shared production area, and often lives in that vendor's job archive for months so reprints are easy. For a restaurant menu, fine. For patient statements, client trust documents, sealed court exhibits, payroll registers or anything under HIPAA, GLBA or a client confidentiality agreement, you have just created a vendor relationship that needs a signed business associate agreement, a security review, and language about data retention and destruction.
Most small print shops will not sign a BAA. The ones that will charge more. So a medical office or a law firm comparing $0.09 outsourced against $0.009 in house is not comparing like for like, because the compliant version of outsourcing costs more and takes a contract negotiation. That is a big part of why regulated offices keep leasing machines even as their print volume falls. See our guides on medical office copier leases and law firm copier leases for how those requirements shape the equipment choice.
Run This Test Before You Decide
Take last quarter's print volume off the device meter and split it three ways. First, routine daily pages, the internal memos, invoices, forms and shipping labels. Second, the big or special jobs. Third, anything confidential or regulated.
Price bucket one at outsourced rates and add $13 per job of staff time. If it beats your lease payment, outsource it. It almost never does above 2,000 pages a month. Bucket two should go out no matter what your lease costs. Bucket three stays in house unless you are willing to run a vendor security review.
Most offices that do this exercise end up keeping a smaller, cheaper machine and shifting only bucket two outside. That usually cuts $80 to $160 a month off the lease without any of the friction of going printer free. Our copier lease cost reduction tips cover how to get to that smaller machine mid term.
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