Printing quota system

tl;dr: Computer science students get approximately enough credits to print 100 double-sided pages per month. If you used up your credits, you have to wait until next month to print again. All printing is free, except if you register for the special thesis printing service.

Free monthly printing quota

We're happy to offer you the student printer for free, but to prevent joy-printing we decided to give every student a certain quota of credits. When you first register on this site and every first of the month you get a (virtual) credit of 1.30€ added to your printing account. This is the equivalent of around 100 duplex grayscale pages per month. The cost for this free monthly quota is covered by the students' representative council and the computer science department.

You can accumulate up to 3.90€ (that is, three months worth of free quota) in your account, after that your account balance is capped.

Please note, although the accounting system uses € (Euro) as a currency symbol to represent the virtual cost of printouts, at no point you will have to pay for the prints (except when you explicitly register for the thesis printing service). Of course there is also no way for you to cash out this virtual money 🤑

Checking your credit balance

Your current balance will be displayed on the printer after login. Alternatively you can also can check your balance by logging into the Papercut interface.

Printing cost

You can see the current rates in the Papercut interface. These rates apply for printing as well as copying documents. The costs are given per single page (that is, one sheet consists of 2 pages in duplex and 1 page in simplex). Before releasing print jobs from your print queue you will see a cost estimate of how much this print job will cost you.

Please keep in mind that these prices are subject to change to reflect the current market prices for paper and toner. We try to adjust the free monthly quota accordingly.

Scanning is always free.

Cost of Thesis Printing

As a paid service we offer thesis printing. Thesis printing is accounted for with the same price rates that were outlined above. However, the costs are not subtracted from your free printing quota (which would usually be insufficient for an average thesis anyway), but from a separate account and you will receive an invoice to be paid (with real money) after thesis printing. You cannot thesis print 'by accident', as you have to explicitly activate this service on the thesis printing site.

You can find more information about this service on the Thesis printing page.

Top-up your printing balance

Currently there is no way to increase your printing balance by paying for it, i.e. if you used up your monthly quota, you have to wait for the next month to be able to print again. In that case you can use one of the  paid machines on campus. However, should there be enough interest in that feature, we might try to implement it. If you would like to speak out in favor of this feature, write us a mail.

Please note that this does not affect thesis printing as it is billed separately.