Coyote Blog

A while back I wrote about the unbelievably egregious price Pitney Bowes charges for the ink cartridges on its mailing machines:

Today I bought what may be the most expensive consumer printer ink available.  We have a small Pitney-Bowes postage meter
that has a little built in ink-jet printer to print out the metered
postage symbol (that sort of red looking stuff that replaces the
stamp).  One of their little print cartridges doesn't last more than at
most a thousand envelopes, which represents at most the
equivalent of 50 pages of text for a normal printer.  For this little
cartridge with its smidgen of ink, I paid $39.99.  At the same time, I
bought two-paks of the HP cartridges I needed (no bargain themselves)
for $25 per cartridge, and these cartridges last for hundreds of
pages.  I can't directly compare the volume of ink, but my sense is
that the P-B cartridge is priced such that it would be over $500 with
an equivalent amount of ink to an HP cartridge.

A reader named Randy Hooker sent me this email, which read in part:

Read your blog post with glee! Almost four years ago I felt the same and developed alternative ink products for many Pitney machines. Our trademarked name is NuPost.
Google that and you'll see there are hundreds of places to buy.

Just as background on the Pitney machines and ink usage: As these meters print "money" rather than images it is critical that the cartridge have ink available at all times.  So, the meter "purges" the print head on a regular basis to insure performance.
This purging uses massive amounts of ink as compared to the printing of a
single indicia.

The Pitney Bowes published output of the cartridge for your machine is 400
to 600 impressions OR 4 months.  If you do not use the meter at all, the purges will exhaust the cartridge over a 4 month period. Infrequent mailers will get very little value from these cartridges, compounding the total cost of ownership.

He was nice enough to send me a sample, which sat on the shelf and I forgot it (sorry).  Then, the other day, I noticed when I ran some mail that the printing looked a lot better than normal - none of bad banding that is typical.  I opened it up and found Randy's cartridge.  This thing is great - its half the price at OfficeMax of the Pitney Bowes cartridge and actually prints better.  Thanks!  (Many online sources of NuPost cartridges here).