I've been using a reMarkable Tablet, for years now. It's great for taking notes at my day job. I waste no paper when I jot down meeting minutes, annotate stories and starting off new pieces of writing in long hand. I dig how easy it is to organize my notes on the tablet and that I can back them up to the cloud—including, recently, to Dropbox and Google Drive. The reMarkable's small development team has been making money, exclusively off of hardware sales. While I appreciate the frequency of their software updates and the functionalty of their E-Ink slab, it's always been in the back of my head that sooner or later, they might go bankrupt, taking their servers, along with my cloud data, with them.
So, today when I heard that the company was going to begin offering a tiered subscription system, I was kind of relieved. If enough folks are willing to pay for the extras that come with their subscriptions, reMarkable will finally have a steady revenue stream.
According to the reMarkable Website, here's the pricing we'll have to deal with:
If you already own a reMarkable tablet, you won't have to pay a damn thing: you'll be able to enjoy their top-tier Connect subscription, for free. Anyone that purchases a reMarkable tablet, from today forward, will have to sort out what level of service they want from the company.
I can say that, most of the time, I tend to use my reMarkable with no access to the Internet, and therefore, no access to most of the perks that come with their $7.99 subscription. Given the steep price of ownership for a reMarkable tablet, I can imagine that many people will be happy giving their free tier of service a go.