Most photocopy shops set a per-page rate by asking a neighbouring shop what they charge. The problem is that your neighbour set their rate the same way, three years ago, without knowing their own ink cost. This guide gives you the actual arithmetic, one component at a time, and then shows how to turn it into a rate you can defend to a customer.

The formula

Your real cost per printed page is the sum of six things. Most shops only count the first two, which is why they consistently lose money on jobs that use a lot of colour or a lot of paper.

• Ink or toner — what the consumable actually cost you per page.
• Paper — what the sheets cost you, including the spoilage.
• Power — a real cost that becomes significant on a colour laser or a large-format run.
• Labour — the counter staff time spent on this job, including the parts you do not charge for.
• Wastage and failures — jams, colour runs, misprints, and the pages you reprint because the count was wrong.
• Overhead — a share of rent, electricity, and the depreciation on the machine, divided across the pages you actually sell.

If your number is lower than your ink and paper costs combined, you are not running a profitable counter. Almost every shop that feels busy but not profitable has this exact bug.

Component one: ink and toner per page

This is the easy part once you know the method. Divide the price you paid for a bottle or cartridge by the number of pages the manufacturer claims for it. Use your real purchase price, not the MRP — a shop buying at distributor rate has a very different number from one buying at retail.

Those figures are illustrations of the arithmetic, not recommended prices — printer models, yields and street prices all move. Take your own numbers and run the same division. One extra thing worth doing: measure your claimed yield against reality for a month by counting your pages between refills. If you are getting 3,400 pages from a bottle rated at 4,500, your real cost per page is 26 paise, not 20, and that is the number you must price against.

Component two: paper

Paper is simple arithmetic and there is no excuse for getting it wrong. Divide the price of a ream by 500. Then multiply by your wastage factor. A counter that jams one sheet in twelve is really paying for 1.08 sheets per printed page, not one.

Component three: power

Calculate this once per machine type rather than per job. A laser printer draws roughly 300 to 500 watts while printing; an inkjet draws around a third of that. Work out the seconds it takes to print one page on your actual machine, then multiply.

• Worked example for a laser: 400 watts, 12 seconds per page, electricity at ₹9 per kWh. That is 0.4 kW × 0.00333 hours = 0.0013 kWh per page, or about 1.2 paise.
• The same calculation for an inkjet at 130 watts is roughly 0.4 paise per page.
• Warm-up time matters on a busy day. A machine that is switched off overnight spends roughly 20–30 seconds per job warming up, which on a single-page job can double its energy cost. Leaving a counter machine on standby is cheaper than powering it cold for every job.

Component four: labour

Decide what an hour of counter time is worth to you and divide by the pages an hour produces for your job type. This is the component shops argue about most, so be clear about what you are including.

Notice that binding is priced per job, not per page. That distinction matters when a student brings you a single page to be spiral bound — the labour dominates completely and a per-page price will never cover it.

Component five: wastage

Track this for two weeks and it will surprise you. Count three things: pages that jam, pages printed with a fault and reprinted, and pages printed for a customer who then walked away or changed their mind.

• Jams usually run between 1 in 200 and 1 in 40 pages depending on paper quality and how well the machine is maintained. Poor paper doubles it.
• Misprints are usually a customer-side error — the wrong file, the wrong version — but they are still your cost. Decide in advance whether you absorb it or re-charge, and tell the customer your policy.
• Abandoned jobs are pure loss. A QR-based queue with the settings captured at upload removes most of these, because the file, the copy count and the colour choice are agreed before the machine starts.

Component six: overhead

Add up your monthly fixed costs — rent, electricity, internet, software, phone — and divide by the number of pages you print in a month. This is the number that turns a busy counter into a profitable one, and it is the one most often left out.

• Monthly fixed costs: divide by monthly page volume to get your overhead per page.
• Machine depreciation: if a printer cost ₹20,000 and you expect it to last four years, that is ₹417 a month. Divide by your monthly pages.
• Both of these are real. If a job does not cover them, doing more of it makes you poorer, not richer.

A complete worked example

Here is a single-sided black-and-white photocopy, using the numbers above throughout.

Now the same job in colour on a laser: ink at 70 paise, paper at 54, power at 1.2, labour at ₹1.50, wastage at 8 paise and overhead at 5 gives roughly ₹4.08 of true cost. Price it accordingly. Colour is where counters most often undercharge, because it is quoted per page like black-and-white while costing several times as much.

Turning the number into a price you can defend

• Step 1 — Set your base rate as true cost plus your margin. If true cost is 96 paise and you want a 40% margin, quote about ₹1.35 and round to ₹1.50.
• Step 2 — Set a separate colour rate. Do not use a small multiplier on the black rate; use the real colour cost.
• Step 3 — Set a minimum charge. Anything under three pages should carry a floor, because the labour is nearly the same.
• Step 4 — Set a binding rate per job, not per page.
• Step 5 — Offer volume discounts only above a threshold you can afford. Below about 200 pages, bulk pricing usually loses you money once wastage is counted.
• Step 6 — Review quarterly. Ink prices move, and your overhead per page changes as your volume does.

The most common mistake on this list is step five. A shop that discounts heavily on large student runs often loses money on exactly the volume that keeps the lights on, because every misprint on a 400-page job costs real money.

Six pricing mistakes that quietly cost money

• Quoting colour as a small multiple of black. Colour laser pages often cost three to five times what black-and-white pages cost, so a 1.5x multiplier loses money on every colour job.
• Ignoring duplex when quoting. A duplex job uses half the paper of the same job printed single-sided, but takes longer. Charge for the sheets, not the impressions, and say so clearly.
• No minimum charge. A single-page photocopy costs almost the same in labour as a fifty-page one, so a flat per-page rate loses money on every small job you take.
• Free reprint promises with no stated conditions. Offer a free reprint only for a technical fault, and say what counts as one. A blanket promise means customers bring you their own mistakes for free.
• Discounting the labour. When volume gets tight, the instinct is to cut the price. Cut the wastage instead — that is where the recoverable money actually is.
• Never rechecking. Set a recurring reminder to redo this calculation. Ink prices move more often than most shop owners expect, and a rate set two years ago is usually wrong in whichever direction hurts less to leave alone.

Where to go next

Now that you know your cost, the next two levers are worth attention. Our paper GSM guide explains how paper choice affects both your cost and your ink consumption, and our guide to making a print counter profitable covers the pricing strategy side — minimum charges, bulk thresholds, and when to turn a job away.