How to charge for printing in a coworking space

Should you charge at all?

Every coworking space has a printer, and every operator eventually asks whether to charge for it. There are three honest answers:

• Include it. Printing is part of the membership, with no limit. Simple, and members like it, but it hides a real cost and lets a few heavy users print at everyone else’s expense.
• Charge per page. Members pay for what they print. Fair, but only if the price is clear before they print and the bill matches what came out.
• Include some, charge for the rest. Plans come with a printing allowance or credit, and pages beyond it are charged. This is where most spaces settle, because it keeps printing free for normal use and fair for heavy use.

Whichever you choose, you need to know what a page costs you. Even if you include printing, that number tells you what each plan’s allowance is worth.

Work out what a page costs you

A printed page costs more than the paper. Four things add up:

1. Toner or ink. The cartridge price divided by its rated yield, the number of pages it prints.
2. Other consumables. On laser printers, drums, imaging units and fusers wear out too, and also have rated yields.
3. Paper. The price of a ream divided by 500 sheets.
4. The printer itself. Its purchase price spread over the pages you expect it to print, or your lease cost divided by your monthly pages.

If you have a managed print contract that charges per page (a “cost per click”), the contract already gives you the first two, and often the fourth.

Read cartridge yields carefully

Manufacturers measure yield with standard test pages. For black toner, ISO/IEC 19752 uses a page with about 5% coverage: a short business letter. Color yields use a set of standard pages too (ISO/IEC 19798 for color laser cartridges, ISO/IEC 24711 for inkjet). Real pages with logos, charts or photos use more toner than the test page, so a cartridge rarely reaches its rated yield in a coworking space. Building a margin into your price covers that.

A worked example

Here is the sum for a typical small color laser printer. The prices are illustrative; use your own invoices.

The color page costs roughly three times the black & white one at standard coverage, and much more for a slide with a full-bleed photo. That gap is why color needs its own price.

Work out your own numbers with the cost per page calculator

Choose a pricing model

Once you know your cost, pick how members pay. These are the four models coworking spaces use, alone or combined:

Most spaces end up with a mix: dedicated desks and private offices get a monthly printing credit, hot desks and day passes pay per page, and anyone can top up with a bundle. The important part is that credit is always used before anything is charged, automatically.

Set your prices

With a cost per page and a model, setting the price is the easy part.

Add a margin, then round

Your cost per page assumes standard coverage and no waste. Real use includes heavier pages, the odd reprint and the time someone spends loading paper. Many operators multiply their cost by two or three and round to a number that’s easy to remember: members should be able to guess the price of a 10-page document.

Look at what’s around you

Members compare your price with the nearest print shop or library, not with your toner invoice. Prices vary a lot by city. As one example, some US public libraries list $0.15 for a black & white page and $0.50 for color. Check two or three places near you and stay in the same range.

One price per paper size

If your printer takes both A4 and Letter, the cost per page is close enough to use one price for both, unless you buy one paper much more cheaply than the other.

Per printed side

Charge per printed side. Double-sided printing then costs the same as single-sided for the toner it uses, and members still save paper. Commontray counts every printed side, so prices stay simple.

Price color fairly

Color is where printing bills go wrong. Many systems decide by the setting a member picked: print in color and every page is a color page, including the 19 pages of plain text around one chart. Members notice.

The fair way is to check each page. Commontray looks at every page of every document before it prints: pages with color are charged at the color price, pages without are charged as black & white, even in a color job. Members see which pages are color in the preview, before they confirm.

How Commontray detects color and charges per page

Bill without a spreadsheet

The traditional way to bill printing is to read each member’s page count at the end of the month and type it into invoices. It takes hours and nobody trusts it. Three rules make billing automatic and fair:

• Charge after printing, not after sending. Wait for the printer to report the job finished and charge the pages it printed. Jams, cancelled jobs and empty paper trays then cost the member nothing.
• Use credit first. If a plan includes printing credit, take it before charging anything. Members should never have to ask for it.
• Put printing on the invoice they already get. Printing amounts are small. A separate card payment for $0.70 costs more in fees than it earns, so add the month’s printing to the membership invoice.

Commontray works this way. With the Nexudus integration, printing credit from plans and bundles is used first and the rest goes on the member’s invoice, exactly once. Without a billing platform, the monthly CSV has one row per job with the member, the pages and the amount.

Mistakes to avoid

• Charging for what was sent. A member who sends 30 pages to a printer that jams on page 4 shouldn’t pay for 30.
• Charging a whole document as color. It turns a $2 print into a $15 one, and a member into a complaint.
• Hiding the price. Show it before the member confirms. Surprise charges cause more disputes than high ones.
• Forgetting uncollected prints. Prints left in the tray still cost you toner and paper. With print release, documents only print when their owner is at the printer, and uncollected ones are never printed or charged.
• Making printing a front-desk job. If members need help to add the printer or to pay, the front desk spends its day on it. Printing from a browser removes both.

A checklist to start

• Find your cost per page for black & white and color, with your own invoices.
• Choose a model: included, per page, allowance plus per page, or bundles.
• Set prices with a margin, rounded, and in line with print shops nearby.
• Decide which plans include printing credit, and how much.
• Make sure color is charged only on pages with color.
• Charge after the printer confirms, and never for failed jobs.
• Put printing on the invoice members already receive.
• Tell members the prices in your welcome email and next to the printer.