My building (115 apartments) switched in 2006. We bought new, water-conserving machines ($25,000), operated by a plastic card; you pay for time on the card by inserting cash into a wall-mounted gizmo. It won't accept a credit card; for that, I think you need a phone line. We retained Coinmach to provide repairs when needed and pick up the cash monthly(our managing agent doesn't allow its employees to handle cash,and we didn't want to put that responsibility on our super).

Coinmach is slow in remitting the receipts to us and sometimes slow in responding to service requests. It is also charging us something like $280 a month, which seems very high to me. There was a lower cost service provider (about $180/month, I think) called Mac Gray (I think) and I don't know why we kept Coinmach. After deducting these costs, we are clearing about the same as or a little more than the amount we used to get when Coinmach owned the machines and paid us a monthly fee, namely $900-1,000 a month. It took us a little more than 2 years to amortize the cost of the new machines.

Residents are happy with the switch.