Most businesses either buy printers outright or rent them. There’s a third option that’s less understood but often the better fit for growing offices: managed print services. Instead of paying for hardware, you pay for a print environment that’s maintained, monitored, and stocked, so you never have to think about toner, breakdowns, or ageing equipment again.
Here’s what a managed print contract actually includes, who it makes sense for, and how the pricing works.
What Are Managed Print Services?
Managed print services (MPS) bundle your printer or copier fleet, consumables, maintenance, and support into a single ongoing contract. Rather than owning or renting individual machines and separately sourcing toner or calling out a technician when something breaks, one provider handles the entire print environment. You get one invoice, one point of contact, and equipment that’s proactively monitored rather than fixed only after it fails.
Who Benefits from a Managed Print Contract?
- Businesses with multiple printers or copiers across departments or floors that are hard to track and maintain individually
- Offices that keep running out of toner or waiting days for consumables to arrive
- Companies that have no visibility into what printing actually costs them per month or per page
- Businesses that lose time each time a machine goes down and no one owns the problem
- Organisations planning to grow headcount and don’t want print infrastructure decisions slowing them down
What’s Included in Monostat’s Managed Print Service
Monostat’s managed print contracts are built on the same terms as our printer and copier rentals, with the service layer built in from day one:
- No upfront hardware cost, printers and copiers are supplied as part of the contract
- Full monthly service and maintenance, including consumables
- Free equipment upgrades every 24 months, so your fleet doesn’t age out mid-contract
- Flexible contract terms of 36, 48, or 60 months
- Proactive monitoring that flags issues before they cause downtime
- Support scaled to your business, whether you have 1-5, 5-10, or 10+ users
How Managed Print Pricing Works
Managed print pricing is usually structured one of two ways: a flat monthly fee covering the machine and an agreed volume of pages, or a per-page rate calculated on actual usage. Which model makes sense depends on a few factors:
- Total print volume across your fleet, since per-page pricing rewards predictable, moderate usage
- Number and type of devices, as A3 colour production printers cost more to service than a single A4 desktop unit
- Colour versus mono printing ratio, since colour pages cost significantly more per page in consumables
- Contract length, with longer terms generally reducing the monthly rate
- Service level required, including response time commitments for on-site support
Because fleet size and usage vary so much between businesses, Monostat quotes managed print contracts after reviewing your actual print volumes rather than publishing a generic price list that wouldn’t reflect your real costs.
Managed Print vs Renting vs Buying: How They Differ
Renting gets you a machine with maintenance included but you’re still managing supplies and usage yourself. Buying gives you ownership but leaves you responsible for repairs, consumables, and eventual replacement. Managed print services go a step further than both: the provider takes responsibility for keeping the entire print environment running, not just the hardware. For businesses that want to stop thinking about printers altogether, managed print is usually the better fit.
Managed Print Services in Johannesburg and Gauteng
Monostat is based in Randburg and delivers managed print services to businesses across Johannesburg, Sandton, Pretoria, and the wider Gauteng region, with on-site technicians for fast response and a fully stocked local workshop.
For Johannesburg businesses specifically, the practical difference is response time. Our technicians work out of Randburg, which means a fault logged in the morning is usually attended to the same day rather than queued behind a national dispatch system. Toner and common replacement parts are held locally, so a consumable run-out does not turn into a three-day wait for stock to arrive from another province.
We currently support managed print environments across a range of Johannesburg business types, from single-floor professional practices running two or three devices to multi-department offices with a mixed fleet of A4 mono and A3 colour machines. The contract structure is the same in each case. What changes is the device mix and the monthly volume the contract is built around.
If your offices are spread across more than one Gauteng location, a single managed print contract can cover all of them, with consolidated reporting so you can see print costs per site rather than one aggregate figure.
How to Get Started
The right managed print setup depends entirely on how your business actually prints, not a generic package. Monostat will review your current print volumes, device count, and usage patterns, then put together a contract that matches what you actually need.
Call 010 010 7712 or email info@monostat.co.za to request a print audit, or see our printer and copier rental terms if you’d rather start with a single machine.