There's no "best paper" — there's the right paper for the job
I've managed office supply procurement for a 40-person marketing agency since 2019. We burn through about $12,000 a year in paper products, and every order goes through the AFT calculator I built — short for "after-fees total." It started as a spreadsheet for comparing vendor quotes: unit price, shipping, minimum order quantities, hidden fees. It evolved into a way of catching my own blind spots. List prices lie. I'll get back to that.
The question I hear most often: Is Rhodia worth it, or should I just buy copy paper?
My answer might annoy you: it depends entirely on what you're doing. I'll split it into three scenarios. Odds are, you're in at least one of them.
- Scenario A: You write with a fountain pen, or you're buying for someone who does
- Scenario B: You print documents for an office, day in and day out
- Scenario C: You want to fold a paper airplane from A4 paper and have it actually fly
Scenario A: Fountain pen writing
Here, Rhodia earns its reputation. Put a fountain pen on standard copy paper and the ink feathers like it's running away from something. The 75–80gsm stuff you put in the printer is made from fibers that wick liquid ink outward. Fine for toner. Terrible for a wet nib.
Rhodia's notebooks use heavier 90gsm paper with a finish that tames the ink. That's why fountain pen users are loyal to it. And if you think "fountain pen friendly" is marketing fluff, watch what happens when a broad nib loaded with a wet ink like Diamine Oxblood hits cheap paper. It's not subtle.
I asked our design team to do a blind comparison once, because cost accounting demanded it. A Rhodia A5 dotPad is about $11 for 80 sheets. A $7 ream of copy paper works out to 1.4 cents a sheet. That's a roughly 10× difference in the base price.
My aft calculator added the rest: the 15–20 minutes it took our designer to redo a client sketch that bled through a cheap sheet. At agency rates, that one redo cost more than the entire pad of premium paper.
Price per sheet is the least important number in the room.
It took me three years and about 40 purchase orders to understand that.
Worth noting: Rhodia also sells their own fountain pens — they've been making them for years, even though paper is the product they're known for. Most people who buy a Rhodia fountain pen aren't going to pair it with printer paper. The brand treats the nib-to-paper link as one system, and they're right about that.
That said, if you write with a ballpoint, the coating advantage mostly doesn't matter. Ballpoint ink doesn't spread like fountain pen ink does. You could comfortably write on the cheapest A4 copy paper. Premium paper still feels nicer, and that's fine — just know that at this point it's an aesthetic purchase, not a functional one.
Scenario B: Office printing
For internal documents, drafts, or anything that gets read once and recycled, buy the copy paper. This is the scenario where your budget committee is right.
Stick with 80gsm rather than 75gsm for double-sided printing. Actually, most standard copy paper IS 20 lb bond, which works out to about 75gsm. The next step up — 24 lb bond, about 90gsm — costs more per ream but cuts down show-through. That's a real difference when a page has heavy ink coverage on both sides.
Our rule: internal drafts get standard 75–80gsm. Client-facing proposals, pitch decks, anything left on a table while people judge us — those go on 100gsm or 120gsm paper. The cost difference is pennies per document and it gets lost in the round. If a 50-page proposal is printed on paper that feels like newspaper, people notice. If it's for the trash, don't spend the extra cent.
Here's a mistake I made so you don't have to. In Q3 2024, I swapped our standard copy paper to a no-name brand and "saved" about $11 a month. Two weeks later, our design team started printing proofs twice because the cheap sheets weren't consistent from ream to ream. The $11 disappeared in the first fifteen minutes of extra color checks. I switched back and ate the cost difference. To be fair, most offices won't notice that difference. Design teams will.
One more thing: if you're ordering custom-branded Rhodia notebooks for client gifts, that's not an office supplies expense. That's marketing. It's a different budget, and I've watched teams blow their stationery line because they classified "nice notebook we hand to clients" as paper.
Scenario C: Paper airplanes from A4 paper
Stay with me here. This is where I give you the advice that goes against instinct.
When my niece asked me how to make a paper airplane, I grabbed a Rhodia pad like it owed me a favor. Premium paper, premium plane, right? It flew like a brick.
A paper airplane needs light weight and crisp folds. Standard A4 copy paper, around 80gsm, gives you the best stiffness-to-weight balance for a classic dart. Heavier paper isn't better — it's just heavier. The plane has to generate lift with no power source, and extra grams work against you.
The classic dart takes about thirty seconds. Instead of Googling "how to make a paper airplane from A4 paper" and landing on a 12-minute video, here's the short version:
Take an A4 sheet of copy paper. Fold it in half lengthwise, then unfold so the crease points up. Fold each top corner down to the center line. Fold the sloped edges into the center again. Fold the paper in half along the original crease, sharp nose pointing forward. Fold each side down as a wing, leaving about a thumb-width for the fuselage. Toss. Adjust the wing folds to correct the turn. Repeat.
That exercise costs about a cent and a half in paper. The Rhodia pad, on the other hand, is eleven dollars of beautiful paper that flies worse. Use the cheap stuff for this one. The failure cost is zero, and your niece will be more impressed by a plane that flies than by fancy paper that doesn't.
How to know which scenario you're in
Three questions, in order:
- Who sees this document? If the answer is a client or a customer, quality paper pays for itself. If the answer is your own desk, it doesn't.
- What am I writing with? Fountain pen ink behaves differently from ballpoint ink. If your favorite pen is a wet nib, premium paper is a requirement, not a luxury.
- What does a failed page cost me? If a bleed-through means redoing a page by hand, the "cheap" paper was never cheap. If a crumpled paper airplane costs nothing, you've found the right paper.
If you've read this far and still aren't sure, build your own AFT calculator. List the unit price, the shipping, the time cost of redoing work, the hidden fees. Compare two options honestly. It took me 40 purchase orders spread across three years to realize that the most expensive paper on the shelf is the one you bought for the wrong job.
