My solution: don't print. I find very few reasons to print anything. I get kinda irritated when I have to. I donated blood recently and was miffed that the RapidPass required printing out. Why? I have a phone.
I print very little. The half-capacity starter cartridge in my Lexmark lasted a decade (literally - I bought the printer in late-2005 and had to track down a new cartridge in 2016) before I finally needed to replace it. I guess I averaged something like 20-30 pages per year over that time.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, prints a lot more (still, probably under 20 pages per month). Most of it is things that actually need to be printed, like paper-piecing quilting[0] patterns where you need to cut pieces out in order to use them as a guide for sewing. Colour is helpful for these too.
The nice thing about a laser printer is it can go months without printing and when I click print it just wakes up and does its job and goes back to sleep after a bit.
