How to password protect and page count a printer

ill check on that but i would prefer an opensource/free option if possible

There are tons of open source packages that do what you want. Just set up your spare computer as a Linux print server with http://www.lprng.com/, and then you can use either http://prqd.sourceforge.net/, http://ieee.uow.edu.au/~daniel/software/printbill/ or http://printquota.sourceforge.net/to implement the functionality you want. If you want to use CUPS, there's also http://www.pykota.com/.

And as soon as you finish pulling your hair out configuring pykota on a linux server, you'll wish you'd dropped the $75 (or whatever) on PaperCut. I say this from bloody experience. As I value my time, PaperCut was a godsend that made my printer administration work on a small lab network much, much easier and faster. Cross-platform, too. Runs on anything.

Whatever printer admin package you choose, it's going to run on a computer, not on the printer itself; so there is no need for you to be spending extra on a network-capable printer. If you plug a network-capable printer directly onto your network, the first thing anybody who doesn't like your page pricing policy is going to do is connect to it directly instead of going through your print server, bypassing all your accounting. Personally I'm quite fond of the HP LaserJet 1320; it's a solid little workhorse, and the non-network version is a couple hundred dollars cheaper than the 1320N.