I dug in deep to find the prices so others don't have to. Personally, I'm fine with this model a lot of the great features are probably supported by doing compute in the cloud and there are also huge advantages to having storage in the cloud.
1. the device without subscription is crippled in unnecessary ways (access to third-party cloud-services like Dropbox, for instance)
2. the already high cost of the hardware relative to other options.
I've been looking at ReMarkable since I saw a prototype that a friend was using. But in the end I just knew it would join the pile of unused gadgets (with good intentions) that litter my home.
A subscription service really is the nail in the coffin for me.
The storage integration should be on the device, they choose to make it via the cloud service. There is no technical reason they could not have made it work directly on the device.
Further their 2 largest competitors in the Space, SuperNote, and Boox all seem to be able to offers these features and more for free.
The issue here, with niche products you must interact with the community, you must listen to the users, you must have a good communications team to show the users what is commming, what your plans are, etc..
Remarkable does none of that, they act like they are apple, but they neither have the marketshare, the deep pockets, nor the cache that Apple does.
Hell I would be more than happy to donate cash to fund features but they do not even have a public roadmap, or uservoice, or any indicate they give a shit at all about what their users want.
hell one of the most basic features, 3 years running, has been custom templates. Which are literally just a PNG file background layer. No official support but several 3rd parties have filled this gap very well.
Remarkable is remarkably bad at customer service, and communications. Which is more likely to be their downfall than the subscription service. Niche product live and die by their community, remarkable ignores the owner community
One of the reasons I selected the SuperNote a5x as my target replacement if/when I need to replace my Remarkable is the fact that the developers of the SuperNote are very active in the community, on reddit, and publish roadmaps which they deliver on...