Xerox leased its copier and charged per copy

The Xerox 914, unveiled in 1959, was the first plain-paper office copier and a genuine breakthrough — but pricing it to sell meant recovering its full manufacturing cost per unit, which put the sticker at roughly $29,500, an impossible line item for the office-supplies budget of the small and mid-size businesses that were the machine's natural market. Rival copying methods (mimeograph, carbon paper, wet-process photocopying) were cheap per page even though they were slow and messy, so a $29,500 capital purchase looked absurd next to them regardless of how much better the 914 actually was.

Haloid-Xerox needed offices to experience how much they'd use a fast plain-paper copier once they had one, but no purchasing manager was going to approve that experiment at a price five figures long.

Xerox leased the 914 for $95 a month, which included 2,000 free copies, and billed four cents for every copy beyond that, tracked on a meter built into every machine and read by the same service technicians who kept it running. The company effectively gave up trying to capture the machine's value at the point of sale and instead captured it copy by copy, for as long as the office kept using the machine.

Leased it for $95 a month with 2,000 free copies, then billed per copy via a meter, turning a capital purchase into a reversible operating expense that rose with usage.

A per-copy fee reads as small and reversible, unlike a large capital purchase.

The meter ties revenue to actual usage, capturing more value from heavy users.

Free copies let customers discover need before paying, easing adoption.

When a product's price is the barrier, price the unit of use customers already budget for, not the object.

Xerox's revenue grew from $32 million in 1959 to over $1 billion by 1970, driven almost entirely by the per-copy meter. The metered lease became the template for the entire copier and later managed-print-services industry, and 'the Xerox model' is now the standard shorthand for pricing hardware by the customer's usage rather than by the hardware's cost.