I was expecting to pay a premium for toner, but not a "might as well throw the printer out and get a new one" premium.
After that, I never bought anything HP again. Said laptop went into the bin a year after I bought it because it wouldn't stop bluescreening.
I have a Brother laser printer and I am reasonably happy with that (as happy as you can be with a printer, I guess).
Try going into the Admin settings of the printer - usually via the admin web interface of the device - and look for Print Quality/Density settings. You can set the printer to use even less toner/ink than Draft without having to sacrifice legible quality. So you'll be able to print in good quality while using less ink. And you can set it to use even less ink than Draft mode usually does.