calculating cost of ink & paper in software

[desktopstudio]

I used to use a Caldera rip - Visual+ (with an Epson Pro9800) which had a facility which, when the cost of paper & ink were input, calculated the overall cost of each print - very useful when charging customers. This was a few years ago and I am no longer using the Caldera s/w (the PC died and our supplier - Xerox - deemed the hardware obsolete & best upgrade costs around £1,500).
Anybody know of any software that would perform something similar without having to spend that sort of money?
Thanks
Brian

[JRSmit]

Excel. The cost of a print is more than paper and ink . Actually ink is one of the smallest cost items.

[desktopstudio]

Thanks for that suggestion.
I could do the calculation in a spreadsheet of course, but I would need to know the ink yields and struggling to find this info and the Caldera s/w had this built in (well I assume it did!) - all I had to do was key in the ink and paper costs and after each print it performed the calculation - presumably it must use the printer's ink levels (capacities) to determine the amount used.
Brian   

[JayWPage]

I have noticed that info reported a few times in the last few years on LL, but you may have to dig for it.

Here is a link at Red River paper that gives some numbers for ink consumption for an Epson 3880: http://www.redrivercatalog.com/cost-of-inkjet-printing-epson-3800-3880.html

[desktopstudio]

Thanks Jay - that was just what I needed to kickstart the old grey cells!

I had already looked at the redriver report but skimmed over it as it referred only to the 3800/3880
But it did get me thinking: there must be some sort of job information readout on my printer and sure enough after a little delving into the documentation I found it!
There are statistics available for most things such as amount of ink used, page count and paper size used.
Of course because in the past I had the Caldera software frontend doing all this stuff, I had never really looked very closely at what delights the printer's LCD could display and print out.

So all I need to do now is pop this info into my spreadsheet and let Excel to its bit.

Now what would be really cool .... some clever programmer could write a routine to access the printer's internal usage statistic counters etc.
unfortunately, I'm not clever nor am I a programmer ....
Brian