An interactive calculator that tells you whether to lease or buy your next copier
Five inputs — hardware price, monthly volume, term length, your office's cost of capital, and a preference toggle — produce a five-year cost comparison and a defensible verdict on whether to lease or buy the device.
Tell the calculator about your office
The calculator above produces a defensible verdict on the lease-or-buy question for a specific copier deal in roughly thirty seconds. It takes five inputs the buyer typically knows or can estimate quickly — the hardware price, the office's monthly print volume, the office's cost of capital, the lease term being considered, and a qualitative read on the office's working-capital tightness — and produces a five-year cost comparison plus a recommendation. The math behind the calculation is shown below for buyers who want to understand or sanity-check the result.
The recommendation depends on the inputs the buyer provides, which means the same calculator can produce opposite recommendations for the same device in two different offices. That outcome reflects the underlying reality: lease versus buy is not a universal answer. The output sits at the intersection of the financial inputs and the office's procurement preferences, and the calculator surfaces that intersection clearly.
How the calculator computes the answer
Three formulas behind the verdict
The lease total folds in an implicit finance rate that varies by term length — 4.8% for 36-month terms, 6.4% for 48-month terms, and 7.6% for 60-month terms. The buy total includes both the headline hardware price and the opportunity cost of the working capital tied up at acquisition, calculated against the buyer's stated cost-of-capital input. When the buyer flags working capital as tight, an additional 4% per year surcharge is applied to the buy path to reflect the financial strain of the upfront outlay.
The verdict is whichever path produces the lower five-year total. The gap between the two totals is reported as the recommendation's strength. A €200 gap is a marginal call; a €3,000 gap is decisive. The narrative output explains which input drove the result and what would shift the answer in the other direction.
Three pre-computed worked profiles
Madrid pyme · €6,800 device
Ample working capital and moderate cost of capital favour outright purchase. The lease implicit finance rate of 6.4% exceeds the office's 6% cost of capital, making lease the more expensive path.
Architecture studio · €4,800 device
High cost of capital and tight working capital both push toward leasing. The €4,800 upfront would deliver 10%+ deployed elsewhere; preserving cash matters more than the finance margin.
Print shop · €38,000 production engine
Strong cash position and a low cost-of-capital benchmark from the existing banking facility. On a high-value production device, the finance margin compounded over 60 months produces a large absolute gap.
Reading the verdict honestly
The calculator produces a defensible numerical verdict, not a definitive answer. Three considerations sit outside the formulas and deserve the office's attention before signing either path. The first is hardware-refresh preference: a buyer who values being on current-generation hardware every 4 years gains an automatic refresh through leasing that no purchase mathematics captures. The second is service-contract preference: lease bundles typically include a service contract while purchases require a separately negotiated contract, and the negotiation effort itself is a real-world cost. The third is balance-sheet posture: lease keeps the device off the balance sheet under PGC PYMES, which can matter for covenant-sensitive offices.
Use the calculator to anchor the conversation in numbers rather than instinct, and use the qualitative considerations above to adjust the conclusion where they apply. The combination produces a procurement decision the office can defend to both finance and operations stakeholders.