i may have less ink in there than i thought.
i think it's worse than that.
1) the size of the cartridges is steadily decreasing.
2) they base their metrics on very minimal coverage, and cover art tends to be very ink heavy. if they say you get 500 pages at 5% coverage and i'm printing at 50% coverage, each page i'm printing is 10 pages in the metrics. so, i'm only getting 50 pages, but it's fifty pages at ten times the metric - and there's your 500 pages.
i'm going to look for something more efficient. but, i think the reality is just that the price of ink is extremely high, and if you want a package like this it's going to cost me some money to make it.
again: it's not so so bad, really.
maybe i lowballed the cost.