Brother’s New Printer Pricing Model
A few days back Brother announced PICOCHARGE, a new type of printer pricing model for consumers and home users. (as of writing it seems like this service is only available in Japan)
The basic concept of this new pricing model is purchasing of pre-paid print allocation.
You do have to purchase the printer (JPY 20,000) initially, and it comes with a pre-paid allocation of 1,000 pages.
When your print allocation runs out, you can choose to top-up your print allocation via their app/portal page, which currently comes in 6 tiers:
10 pages for JPY 200
50 pages for JPY 500
150 pages for JPY 1200
500 pages for JPY 3500
1000 pages for JPY 5000
3000 pages for JPY 9000
As you can see the bigger the pre-paid allocation you purchase, the less it cost to print per page.
Furthermore there is no difference in price for printing in monochrome or color - printing 1 page counts as 1 page regardless of color settings.
When the ink is about to run out you will get a notification asking you to request for new ink, which will then be delivered to you for free.
At the time of writing, I do find this a little confusing as the official site does have slightly contradicting statements in their contents:
The special contents page (linked at the start of the article) states that replacement free ink cartridges would be sent to you when your ink runs out.
The official news release article states that free shipping would be available for replacement cartridges - somehow the wording here sounds like you have to pay for the ink and only shipping is free?
There is no proper FAQ page up for this new service yet (only article in their FAQ is how to top-up your allocation), so right now the only information I have are from the press releases and the official site.
In all honesty I do think there might be a small miscommunication in the wording of the official news release, since by buying pre-paid allocation you are supposedly already paying for the required ink (and hence a new pricing model) - it just does not make sense to have to buy allocation AND ink at the same time.
** I will update this post again when I get more clarity regarding this issue.
That being said, if the new pricing model means just purchasing pre-paid allocation, and replacement ink cartridges are all provided at no additional cost, then I think it does make it very applicable for my use case - if I top up JPY 9000 I would be able to print my photos at JPY 3/page, which is much more economical than what I am paying for right now.
** Update 14/2/2024
Got a response from them regarding my enquiry, and yes the purchase of the print allocation includes the replacement ink cartridges, so there are no additional costs apart from having to purchase the printer initially and print allocation top-up.