We are having a great degree of difficulty determining the best way to provide service contracts on the voyager machines.
Since our main target audience for these is B to C, we feel like the monochrome rates have to be relatively competitive with monochrome machines.
The problem basically boils down to volume. With the maintenance kits rated for 300,000 prints and a cost of about $1500 - we need to be at about $59 per month with no toner included to (maybe) break even if they make 300,000 or fewer copies during a three year period.
Sadly, the kit prices are reversed - the kit required for black is the most expensive. It should be the other way around - the color components should be $1100 and the B/W should be $400. This would enable us to write B/W only contracts and have color maintenance items the responsibility of the customer to pay for.

We're finding that if we do include everything at $.015 b/w and $.07 color we're having page coverage problems from those who do use it, but mainly an aversion to color use at all from many customers due to the higher per page cost. They are simply telling their staff to not print color at all.
Basically, we want to take color toner out of the equation for what we cover - and possibly color consumables, while still covering all b/w items.

It's not that the black kit is expensive. MK825A includes all 4 drum units, transfer unit & roller, fuser unit along with the black dv unit. The MK825B only come with the C ,M & Y dv units. Our contract include all parts and supplies, billed Monthly or Quarterly CPC. B/W .018 and Color .10. Even if the customer does not make color copies the units are cycled and are being used for calibration. At PM time you will still need to change the color drums and dv units to reactivate the 3 yr 300K warranty. If they don't want to make color copies, yank the machine and give them a B/W.

Do you have any minimums required in your contracts? If a customer does 1,500 B/W and 500 Color per month with no minimum your maximum profit in a 3 year period if NOTHING went wrong with the machine and the customer always got the maximum yield from the toner would be $621.65. This doesn't give much room for error - especially since I have never seen these machines come close to yield on toner.

I'm also quite surprised you're getting that much for business class color. Most of our competition is between $.055 and $.079 for business class.

more on this subject would be helpful

We have decided that we will ONLY provide voyager equipment on a 3 year lease.
We have recently decided to put agreements on these that are $.015 per click with black toner only included. Customer contracts to buy color toner from us. For B-C customers this pricing structure is easier to swallow and it protects us from extreme toner usage since they pay for the color (although black yield is off - I'm hoping the 'Laser Power' setting for black only will take care of most of that).
We were finding that many of the customers weren't printing in color almost at all out of fear of the price - even when it was just a hyperlink on a page or something.

Anyway, at the end of the 3 years we will evaluate usage and offer the buyout to the customer with a prorated maintenance kit if they want to keep it going.

For Example:
At the end of the 3 year term, John Doe's KM-C3232 has 150,000 copies. The buyout to keep on the lease is $2000. The maintenance kit only went half yield during the term so the prorated kit is $900.
The total buyout to keep the machine and retain a maintenance agreement would be $2,900.

The argument at this point would be that it would be better to upgrade John Doe to a new machine, since the technology will have further improved by then (hopefully) and the cost of operation will likely have decreased as well.

The long maintenance cycles on these will likely bite us all on these. I think it is likely that about 30% of the customers we would place these with (if we pretty much exclusively pushed color in the mid-performance range) won't hit 200,000 copies in 3 years.

Hopefully we will be able to get warranty claims through on these if need be during the initial 3 year period or we'll all go bankrupt.

If we provide color toner in the agreement we are trying to stick to $.07 if at all possible.