The standard office copier agreement runs sixty months. Five years, signed on the strength of a monthly figure, by someone who reasonably assumed the monthly figure was the deal.
It usually is not. Here is what is actually in one, stated without drama, the clauses are not hidden, they are just in a document nobody reads twice.
What the sixty months actually contains
An escalator. A clause raising your payment on a fixed schedule, commonly a few percent a year. It compounds. Year five is meaningfully more expensive than year one, and nothing about your business changed to cause it.
A separate service contract. The lease covers the equipment. Keeping it running is a second agreement with its own price and its own escalator.
Supplies billed separately. Toner arrives on its own invoices at its own pace.
Overage rates. Priced per page, applied when you exceed an allowance set by an estimate you made before you had the machine.
A buyout figure. This is the one that matters. Leaving early does not mean paying a fee. It typically means paying the remaining payments, sometimes all of them. Thirty months into a five-year term, walking away can cost more than staying.
Automatic renewal. Some agreements roll into another term unless you give notice inside a specific window, often months before the end date. Miss it and you are in year six.
None of this is illegal or unusual. It is the standard structure. The problem is that it prices a five-year relationship at signing and then removes any reason to keep earning it.
Why five years stopped fitting
Offices change faster than they used to. Headcount moves. Locations open and close. A hybrid schedule cuts print volume by half and nobody planned it. A grant lands and volume triples for eight months.
A copier specced in 2021 for a 2021 office is not necessarily the right machine now, and under a sixty-month agreement, that is a problem you fund rather than solve.
What month-to-month changes
We lease on thirty days' written notice. No minimum term, no fixed end date, no automatic renewal, no buyout figure, no early termination penalty.
The practical differences:
One rate, one line. Equipment, all toner, all parts and labor, every service call, preventive maintenance, delivery and installation. Outside it: paper, pages past your allowance, optional network setup billed hourly, and Illinois sales and use tax. Those four, all stated on your proposal.
No escalator. We can adjust a rate on sixty days' written notice, and you can cancel before it takes effect with no penalty. There is nothing in the agreement that raises your bill on a schedule.
Equipment that follows the business. Upgrade, downgrade or add a machine at any time, at no charge. Volume climbs, we swap it. A location closes, we take one back.
A one-page proposal. Every cost on it, signed by DocuSign. No credit check, no hard inquiry, no waiting on approval. Most customers go from first call to signature in about fifteen minutes.
What it costs us to work this way
We have to be worth keeping every single month. If service slips, you leave in thirty days, and we have no clause to hide behind. That is the point, it puts the pressure in the right place.
We will also be straight about the one cost on the way out: return shipping or pickup is yours. We would rather write that here than let you discover it later.
Before you sign anything
Find the escalator, find the buyout figure, and find the renewal notice window. If a provider cannot point to all three inside a minute, that is your answer.
Black and white from $150 a month, color from $225, both covering up to 5,000 pages, everything included.