Colour pages can cost five to ten times more than mono. Here is how to get colour where it matters and stop paying for it everywhere else.
The real cost gap
A mono A4 page costs a few cents in toner. A colour page, once you account for all four toners and higher-cost colour drums, commonly lands between 25 and 40 cents. That is a five-to-ten-times difference on every single page. Across a busy office printing thousands of colour pages a month — much of it email, web pages, and internal documents nobody needed in colour — that gap quietly becomes thousands of dollars a year.
The cost you cannot see
Toner is only part of it. The real waste is volume nobody chose: the eight-page email printed in colour, the duplicate copy, the report printed and never collected. Print-management studies routinely find that a meaningful share of office print is never even picked up off the tray. Every one of those pages cost you colour toner, paper, energy, and device wear for nothing.
Default to mono
The single most effective change is to set printers to mono by default, with colour available the instant someone actively chooses it. Most documents never needed colour in the first place. In the deployments we run, this one policy typically cuts colour volume by 60 to 80% — with virtually no complaints, because the people who genuinely need colour still get it in one click.
Where colour earns its keep
This is not about banning colour. Client-facing proposals, marketing collateral, presentations, and signage are exactly where colour pays for itself in how your business is perceived. The goal is simply to make colour easy for the work that benefits from it and invisible-by-default for the work that does not. Good print management is about routing the cost to where it creates value.
How we measure and control it
At Elevate we deploy PaperCut, which shows every page printed by user, device, and colour-versus-mono, then lets us set the rules — default mono, default double-sided, quotas where needed, and a prompt before large jobs. You get a clear monthly report and a print bill that finally reflects what your business actually needs. Most clients see the savings inside the first quarter.
A worked example
Put real numbers on it. Take a 30-person office printing 4,000 colour pages a month at, say, 30 cents a page — that is $1,200 a month, or $14,400 a year, in colour alone. Cut that volume by 70% with a sensible mono-default policy and you save over $10,000 a year, for the cost of a configuration change. We have run this exact exercise for Geelong clients and the reaction is always the same: nobody realised colour was quietly costing that much, because it never appeared as a single line on an invoice. That is the real value of print management — it makes the invisible visible. At Elevate we start every print engagement with two weeks of measurement, so the savings we promise are based on your actual numbers, not a brochure.