Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(See UPDATE at the end of this review) Due to the nature of this product, this review will be an ongoing interactive review for the next few months. First, I will outline the process that has to be gone through to start this program, the outline of what to expect as relayed to me, and my actual experiences with the process as it progresses. In the following months, I plan to update this review with actual experience with this service and if it lives up to what it says it will do. WHAT IS THIS PROGRAM LIKE? The idea is that you buy this card for $9.99 and then you get one month free from buying the card. At the time of this review and my sign up, HP was running a special code SCHOOL3 which allows for another three months of free service. That means for the price of $9.99, you should be getting five months free. WHAT TO DO FIRST This service is as follows- you buy the card and you get it in the mail. On this card is a code for entering into the sign up process. At that point, you will be opening an HP Connected account. This is a hub account that all of your printers will go through with SEPARATE accounts for instant ink should you opt to use this system for more than one printer. GET OUR DEBIT/CREDIT CARD OUT You will have to sign up with your debit/credit card in order to open this program. I saw a space for a pre-paid card, but no one could tell me where to get one, not even at HP. I am sure they are around, I just was not aware of what sources to get them and no one I talked to knew what to tell me. GET YOUR PRINTER READY Once you fill out the information- name, address, and your printer- you will have to print out a paper from your printer using the e-print button. That will give you a code to enter into your sign up pages. Once that is done, then your printer will be set up for the instant ink. WHAT TO EXPECT At this point, once your information is entered, your enrollment should be complete. You can enter your codes for bonus months, and it should show up as five months of free service. WHEN DO THE CHARGES START? 7-10 days after you complete enrollment, HP is going to send out some extra large capacity printer cartridges. These will come in every color you need. You only need to put one in when you are running out of ink in your present cartridges. The charge period for payment is not supposed to begin UNTIL YOU PUT YOUR FIRST HP CARTRIDGE IN YOUR PRINTER. I was told by HP that it is recommended at that point that you put in ALL of your HP Instant Ink Cartridges into your printer so that they can track your ink usage and make sure you have ink ready. WHAT WILL YOU BE CHARGED FOR? You will be charged $9.99 a month for up to 300 pages printed on your printer no matter what- black and white, or photos. It does not matter. They will track your usage and then when it looks like you will need ink, only the cartridge that you will run out of will be shipped to you with a postage paid envelope to return the other one. ROLL OVER If you do not use all or any of your allotted 300 pages in a month, that will roll over to the next month - but not over 300 pages in any one month. If you go over your allowances that month, then you will be charged like $1 for 25 pages or something like that. MULTIPLE PRINTERS On the HP Connected site, they have a place for you to enter additional printers into your Instant Ink account. I was told by one source that this meant as long as you did not go over the 300 page limit that you could do both printers on the same account. According to the HP customer service, that is not true. If you open an additional printer account, it goes under the umbrella of the HP Connected Instant Ink account, but requires a different payment method even though it uses the same email. Since I did not sign up another printer at this time, I can not talk of my experience with this aspect of the system. MY FIRST PROBLEM Well, first of all, I had a lot of problems trying to set up my account. The account was not recognizing the extra month that I was supposed to get with the enrollment card as indicated on the card. So, I had to call up HP and get customer service to help me. It was quite a process and took about 15 minutes to get some help. The site would not let me complete my enrollment and was not recognizing the extra month. FIREFOX SEEMS TO GIVE PROBLEMS For some reason Firefox browser was not working with the HP Connected page so with customer service working with me, I had to go to Internet Explorer which I usually prefer NOT to use. The enrollment worked okay on Internet Explorer, BUT my extra month was still not showing up. The customer service rep had to manually enter my information All said and done I spent about an hour to do what should have only taken me a few minutes. ANOTHER TIP The HP Customer Service rep told me that if you do sign up for this system that you should be aware that if you are having a rush of print jobs expected in a certain month or period of time, you need to call HP so that they can make sure you have enough ink for you to do that. Because of no previous trends to show your sudden ink need, or if you have any internet problems, you might not end up with ink when you need it otherwise. FUTURE UPDATES For now I am rating this four stars due to the idiosyncrasies of this sign up system that I had to battle with. I will change and update my review as applicable based upon my experiences with this service over the next few months. UPDATE FEB 22, 2017 I tested this service to the limit. I had some free months coming to me, but I was still using my old cartridges that came with the printer for a LONG time after signing up for this service. Would they honor their promise not to charge me until I put the cartridges in? Would they not bug me at all even if I took a LONG time to do it? The answer is THIS IS A WINNER so far. I got my cartridges back when I first signed up for the program. I did not have a need to use them and was told that this would not kick in until I put in the cartridges. I put them in YESTERDAY when my yellow finally ran out, and true to their promise, they sent me an email to let me know that my program countdown had started. They did not bug me. They did not try to charge me. They honored my free months even though I waited so long. So far, this program is going well. I had to re-install the cartridges twice because they were rejected the first time, but it went well the second time and so far all is well. I will update further as I continue to use this program.