Some print jobs are small and precious — a CV, a contract, a dissertation title page. And then there are the big ones: a 400-page course manual, a semester of lecture notes, a training pack for ten people, exam material you will read once and recycle. For those, the question is always the same: what is the cheapest way to print hundreds of pages in Dublin? Here is the honest answer, with real numbers.
The three levers that decide your price
Whatever you print, three choices drive almost the entire cost:
- Paper grade. Our 70g draft paper with economy black & white printing is our lowest standard price per sheet — made precisely for high-volume reading material. Standard 80g and heavyweight 100g cost more per sheet, but get cheaper the more you print (see volume pricing below).
- Double-sided. Printing on both sides halves the number of sheets. For big documents this single choice can cut your bill dramatically.
- Black & white. Colour costs several times more per page. If the content is text, colour buys you nothing.
Put the three together — draft paper, double-sided, black & white — and a page costs from as little as €0.05 (0.10 per sheet printed on both sides).
What big jobs actually cost
With today's prices (these figures update automatically if our rates change), printing double-sided on draft paper:
- 300 pages = 150 sheets = €15.00 of printing
- 600 pages = 300 sheets = €30.00
- 1,000 pages = 500 sheets = €50.00
Add the €2.95 management fee and An Post delivery (free on a job this size), and a thousand-page job lands at your door for around €52.95 all in. Try getting that number at a copy shop counter — and then carrying the box home.
Volume pricing: the more you print, the less each sheet costs
On standard 80g and premium 100g paper, the sheets in your order are priced in blocks of 100: the first 100 at the standard price, then each block cheaper — 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30% off, the last rate applying to every sheet after 600. A 1,000-page job printed double-sided on standard 80g black & white (500 sheets) comes to €58.50 of printing, and from about 3,034 double-sided pages upwards standard 80g even works out cheaper than draft. Draft keeps its own fixed low price and is not part of volume pricing — your quote always shows the rate for your next sheets.
Where draft paper is the right call (and where it is not)
Draft is for material you use: reading packs, revision notes, manuals, drafts of long documents, anything with a highlighter destiny. It is black & white only and the paper is lighter in the hand — that is exactly where the saving comes from. For documents that represent you (a CV, a client-facing report, a final thesis copy), step up to 80g or 100g. You can mix freely in one order: each file you upload gets its own paper, colour and sides settings.
Three habits that keep big jobs cheap
- Split your PDFs by purpose. Upload the 500-page reading pack as draft double-sided, and the 10-page summary you will present as 100g single-sided — one order, two treatments, minimum spend.
- Order once, not five times. Delivery and the management fee are per order (up to 30 files, 30 MB each), so batching your printing into one order spreads those fixed costs across everything.
- Let delivery be free. Big jobs are rarely urgent, and An Post Standard costs nothing once your printing comes to €30 — see how it works in our delivery guide.
Upload your files, choose draft double-sided, and watch the quote calculate itself — the exact total is on screen before you pay a cent.