Many of these features were free up until now. Yes, we get grandfathered in, for now, but you gotta agree to a new TOS which I am sure makes this a time limited offer if they so choose.

These niche devices need their community, people who are not only taking a lot of notes, drawing a ton or annotating many pdfs, but are willing to invest in this particular platform.

These people you probably want on your side as a company. And yet, look at this lackluster announcement.

Who is to read this and come away with a positive opinion? Current users don’t gain anything that wasn’t already free or announced. They just face the danger of eventually having to pay for what they thought was free. And new users? 8 bucks for yet another cloud storage and little else.

I mean, I appreciate that we now teach revelation principle and two part tariffs in intro econ and mba classes, but you can also blow it in other ways, exhibit A: this announcement.

As-a-service models are rent seeking grift and doomed to failure once a sufficient portion of the population becomes tech literate.

I don't think the tech literacy in western countries will change much. And it has nothing to do with the as-a-service model, which makes a lot of sense in many scenarios, on both the seller's side (predictable cashflow, finances updating old(er) software instead of churning new services/products that need to sell) and the buyers' ( you know you keep getting updates and the provider can't just not fix a serious issue). Why wouldn't a cloud sync service be as a service? You're literally paying for an ongoing thing ( storage somewhere).

Reminder: they want you to pay for using someone else's storage that you've already paid for. Namely Dropbox.

If they just offered their own cloud sync service for a subcription, as opposed to hiding all useful features behind it, nobody would have complained.

I was waiting for my next paycheck to buy one, and then this happened right before. Now I’m opting to just stick with my book.

Smooth move, remarkable.

My favorite part is how they tell you that you’re saving money on the hardware, but having just recently checked all the pricing I can tell you that they increased the base cost on everything to mitigate that.

I've recently been trying to talk myself into a remarkable. Now I don't have to. Thanks, Remarkable.

At this point, I am 100% OneNote and a physical paper notebook. I use OneNote on every single device I own including a Raspberry Pi. I use the handwriting features of OneNote with an iPad pro to sketch ideas while researching. I can also keep handwritten todo's for bigger projects organized with OneNote. I use klipper from my Desktop and Laptop to capture websites into OneNote books all organized by topic. I can get these on my iPhone and iPad. My garage houses my CNC and 3D printers running on Raspberry Pi's. I can look up settings and configurations for my machines inside the notebooks and modify them as needed or just copy and paste from notebook to commandline... all sync'ed to EVERY.DEVICE.I.OWN with a browser or native support in most cases.

These walled gardens are sooooo tired. My paper notebook is the backup and used when I want to sketch or think without distraction from the internet's ubiquitous pull. I take pictures and post those notes into OneNote every now and then to develop the idea further. OneNote on the iPhone makes that super simple and the friction is literally two clicks.

Sometimes, my handwriting will be legible enough to strait OCR into a notebook! I find the OCR to be remarkable for most things, but its not perfect and fails too. However, the whole ecosystem is very much worth the price!

Or should that be, I think?

Just kidding… probably literal meaning.

I received the email a few days ago telling my that those cloud based services, which were advertised as part of the product when we purchased it, would be switching to a subscription service.

Thew new service appears to be offered for FREE to us because we already purchased the devices. Phew!

That said, I think this is going to tank their sales going forward. The TCO on the device has now increased dramatically.

When the change does happen, the new terms of service require you agree that, by them sending you an email with 30 days notice, you'll be deemed to automatically consent to any new charges and fees if you continue to use the service, so you'll probably want to keep a close eye on your inbox:

>reMarkable reserves the right to change the subscription fees or applicable charges and to institute new charges and fees, upon thirty (30) days prior notice (which may be sent by email). Your continued use of reMarkable Connect after the end of the notice period of the aforementioned changes to fees or charges constitute your consent to such fees or charges.

None of this affects me too much, as I've never used their cloud services, use syncthing for synchronization, and bought the device for its (partial) openness, even if that openness appears to have been forced on them by GPLv3 requirements.

(I use a similar system in my paper notes, with a topic index mapping to page numbers. A few minutes of grooming a day suffices to keep it up to date, and it speeds lookups enormously.)

Yet I think the linked page is an example of a terrible marketing: instead of highlighting the benefits of the premium service, they are emphasizing how horrible your user experience will be if you don’t buy one.

Regardless of your stance on their pricing action, that’s a grave marketing mistake. I hope they will fix that.

No need to put lipstick on a pig. It's a monthly fee to connect to Dropbox and Google Drive.

Personally I’m on the fence about it, I got my remarkable 2 last year and I’ve been very pleased with all the updates and features they’ve added to it, I’m also pleased that existing purchasers and users are grandfathered in to the new plan.

What I’m less enthusiastic about is for the potential of new features being exclusive to a higher tier plan than the grandfathered connect plan.

I’m less enthusiastic about recommending the system to new users as well because of the initial expense of the tablet and the ongoing increased costs to ownership that new users will face.

I know many creative types who would love to use this solution, but the expense of the subscription on top of the cost of the device means that it’s prohibitively expensive for them.

I wish remarkable well with this venture because it was probably a difficult choice to make, the risks of potentially closing the door on some new users must have potentially outweighed the revenue gains on new customers. It can’t have sat well with everyone at the organisation, given how they’ve been so good with new features and updates to both versions of the hardware.

IMO remarkable already have extremely stiff competition from the iPads, and the only advantage is it’s eink display. The iPad is pretty much better in every other dimension except for the eink display, but then it’s different rather than worse, since it allows for much more applications (graphics, movies, etc). I truly wish the best for remarkable and for them to start the flood of more high quality eink reader/writer devices.

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...

Not everything needs to be a subscription. I don't care about your cloud storage (in fact, I would prefer to just use my own), and the other "features" should be table stakes for something which costs so much to buy in the first place.

My philosophy is that there's pretty much no content I can't live without and the amount I save from canceling my cable TV pays for the other subs and more.

Software subscriptions I'm much more leery of. I do get Lightroom/Photoshop but I use LR a lot so don't really mind.

I pay for larger iCloud storage and I have a library card.

(I’m a big fan of the library.)

It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see a reversal any time soon. If I was a developer I would also want to do subscription based services, would you (put yourself in the shoes of someone running a software company)?

It’s criminal how many times I have paid for Microsoft Office though.

In the case of some SaaS tools I pay for (like Todoist), I don't resent the model because I've seen steady improvements and the cost is low enough relative to the value I feel like I get. If they increased the price more than ~20%, I would probably cancel and use an alternative.

Netflix is different; I actually don't watch much content and would happily live without it, but it appears to be good enough value during the times I do use it, particularly given that I'm well aware of how expensive their products are to create in the first place.

The problems with reMarkable here are two-fold. Firstly, the existence of any subscription is problematic when the device has such a high up-front cost. Secondly, the prices they have chosen far exceed the value their "extra" services can offer. If they had priced it at $12 per year I would have probably grumbled but accepted it. By $24 we are around my personal tipping point where I think they are being unreasonable and I want to get out of the ecosystem. The real price of around $96 is totally absurd and makes me actively root against the company, at least enough to write these long comments and post them into the void.

For similar reasons the device is expensive and still has a rather poor situation because it's quite special, with a relative small market. Which means it's trapped in a situation where it needs more supporting customers to deliver a good device, but to gain more customers it needs to deliver a good experience.

That's a lot more than you get from most devices of this type.

My 5 year old android-tablet has more ram and cpu than the gen2 remarkable. So I assume they outsourced parts to the cloud simply because it's not running well enough on the tablet itself.

> the rest of the system is linux

Linux, especially on tablets is very exotic. There is no way to benefit from the big ecosystem on android or iOS. Everything must come from the users, the company or regulary desktop-linux, which is not optimized for tabled or eInk. Linux is a good selling point for hackers and nerds, but irrelevant for casual users.

The hardware is perfect for the target audience and there are very few comparable products, but the software is pretty bare-bones and most people have issues with it.

You want a general purpose eink tablet. The reMarkable is most definitely not.

For me the subscription service itself is not the issue, it is far far far too expensive for what they offer in it, and they have broken my trust.

The first thing I did after their announcement was disable auto-updates, I dont really use their cloud services anyway prefering to interact with the device either with SSH or a 3rd party tool (RCU), my fear now is a future update will disable SSH and the ability for people to opt-out of their cloud.

I am grandfathered in, so I get it for free, but I have no intention of using

Today if I needed to replace my device I would buy a SuperNote A5X

> The General Public License version 3 and the Lesser General Public License version 3 also requires you as an end-user to be able to access your device to be able to modify the copyrighted software licensed under these licenses running on it.

> To do so, this device acts as an USB ethernet device, and you can connect using the SSH protocol using the username 'root' and the password 'hunter2'.

(Incidentally, “an USB”—are they pronouncing “usb” as one syllable or something?)

So COGlory is actually roughly right. They could disable SSH, but would need to replace it with something at least vaguely similar for GPLv3 and LGPLv3 compliance for other parts of the software.

[0] https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-elipsa

Caution however, the company violates the GPL, which might be a deal-breaker for some.

Everything needs to be a subscription, according to Wall Street.

You simply can't beat open ecosystem like android with some proprietary crap (unless you're FAANG). Having chrome browser fully in-sync with desktop one is a killer feature for me.

With supernote currently giving a roadmap that improves handwriting recognition and boox allegedly having the ability to convert and search handwritten notes already, the remarkable connect plan is very unattractive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=277431

https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

Worth mentioning that they have given lifetime access to existing customers, but I had been planning on giving devices to staff at the end of the year, this announcement has significantly cooled my enthusiasm.

If Remarkable staff are reading and are willing to extend the lifetime offer to existing clients for new purchases, feel free to speak up..

Notice that they avoid saying ‘lifetime’ anywhere, or saying anything about how long that access will last in their announcements and communications. They do discuss the length of the access in their FAQ, where they say that they plan to offer the free access for ´as long as we're able to’, but that ‘there are things we can't control that might affect this’, along with a number of other vague statements. The terms of service, even for the free subscription, has you agree that they can start charging you at any time after 30 days notice, with no other consent or acknowledgment from you. Everything seems to be written with the expectation of removing the free access after disappointment with the new subscription service subsides.

I can use Dropbox and Google drive on a 2011 laptop running Win7, already EOL'd for 2 years. Even when desktop sync is no longer supported, the web client will still work.

What will happen when these guys get bored and move on to something else?

Dear reMarkable customer,

We’re excited to be launching Connect, our brand new subscription service.

Connect replaces our existing cloud service and its associated features moving forward.

We want to offer all our existing customers full free access to Connect. Our way to thank all of you for believing in us right from the start.

All you need to do is log in to My reMarkable to view and accept our new terms and conditions.

Accept new terms and conditions

To ensure you can continue storing all your notes in the cloud, using our desktop and mobile apps, and enjoying features such as Handwriting conversion and Send by email, please accept our new terms and conditions.

Your free access to Connect includes all new launch features, such as integration with Google Drive and Screen Share, and applies regardless of if you own a reMarkable 1 or 2.

The notion of a Linux-based tablet was appealing. I hugely dislike Android. However I purchased an Onyx BOOX with 64 GB onboard storage. It is a fairly customised Android build (and largely de-Googled). This provides access to several useful apps (Firefox, Pocket, and Termux most notably), as well as built-in Bluetooth support meaning external keyboards can be used. (reMarkable supports this only through a hardware connection.)

I'd really like a viable Linux tablet. I'm keeping an eye on Pine's offerings. But reMarkable appear to be headed in an unfortunate direction.

My interpretation is that reMarkable are crippling onboard storage (much as Google have on Android devices) to drive adoption of cloud-based services, whether for surviellance (in Google's case) or subscription revenues (in reMarkable's).

I can use Syncthing Fork on it to handle P2P file sync because I cam install Fdroid as well.

The SaaS-ification of everything in the US is just such a tragedy. Buy once, pay forever.

What this also means long term is that any openness of the device is under a Damocles sword and will be actively expanded except where GPL demands it. The benefit of openness does not appear directly in a spreadsheet like a subscription service does, and if people start trying to supercede the subscription service, they will attack it.

Or just not continue it into the next iteration.

Could this be one of the reasons Remarkable is launching this service? Or are they just trying to get more revenue (and higher profit margins) out of their existing business?

it’s almost never because of a revenue decline. it’s almost certainly revenue plateauing that’s seen as a problem, in a political economy that simplistically only values ‘more’. i’m sure remarkable could be a good niche business (where niche is many, many millions of dollars), but that’s clearly not enough. diverting limited resources from developing better on-device software to cloud-based software is the telling move here. many companies are capable delivering enough incremental value over time to create a (more slowly) growing, sustainable business without instituting a subscription model (logitech or even pre-itunes apple, for instance).

I'm hesitant to say I want an app-store, because it implies a lot of stuff I don't want, but something like an app-store would make it a very different proposition. It would turn a single use device into a platform. It feels a bit silly to point this out in 2021. I can't say I understand the reMarkable product strategy. There is something extremely Norwegian about it: let's limit our scope to what we're comfortable with and keep ambitions in check. We Norwegians like to play it safe - so we rarely make a difference when it comes to innovation.

I've been on the fence with reMarkable since it was launched. Waiting to see which direction it would head in. I think this announcement probably means it isn't going to be a device for me.

I'm simply not looking for yet another device that requires some form of ongoing engagement (monthly payment) to merely work. I try hard to reduce the number of things sucking money out of my account whether I use them or not.

In order to justify that it would have to be on par with my mobile in terms of "importance" - and right now the reMarkable kind of struggles to beat pen and paper for me. This makes me a bit sad, because I think there is a lot of untapped potential in eInk form factors. Especially form factors that lend themselves to interactivity.

I think reMarkable needs to multiply all their ambitions by an order of magnitude or two, find funding and get to work. This announcement feels a bit like they're giving up on having ambitions.

(The SSH root password is in the help/about section where the open source licenses are listed.)

My dad isn't going to SSH into a tablet.

"Feature phones" illustrated this. I wrote a few (very simple) apps for Symbian phones, and for Java Mobile Edition way back when. But there were good reasons why this never caught on and why I never bothered doing any serious development on them.

> reMarkable might do it for me if they had a more powerful CPU onboard and a way to get your code to run on it so the device can be tailored to solve more use-cases.

And there are a few app loaders/package managers that let you download new packages for it, but I agree that reMarkable isn't yet a product for your dad. Another serious product design flaw is that it does not support full disk encryption, or any encryption of documents for that matter. That means that anything uploaded to reMarkable cloud is accessible to reMarkable staff. That makes it basically unusable for work for me. It's a shame because the Screen Share (f.k.a. Live View) feature makes it a really great whiteboarding tool.

> "Feature phones" illustrated this. I wrote a few (very simple) apps for Symbian phones, and for Java Mobile Edition way back when. But there were good reasons why this never caught on and why I never bothered doing any serious development on them.

Back in the day, WhatsApp did spend the time to build a messenger app in J2ME (this was long before the Facebook acquisition), which made it possible for them to serve a very large worldwide population where smartphones hadn't penetrated. There weren't too many cheap, accessible smartphone options that had app stores or package managers available for under $500USD back then, but you could get a Motorola phone for cheap or even free from your carrier in most countries, and those supported J2ME apps. Their J2ME apps were a key (if not THE key) customer acquisition channel that got them a large underserved userbase from countries that Facebook hadn't penetrated deeply at that point. In my opinion, this non-overlapping set of users that were using WhatsApp daily was one of the reasons they were able to command a premium during acquisition. It was a hell of an increase to DAU/MAU.

In that era, per-message SMS fees, per-minute phone plans, long distance charges, and other extortionate fees were commonplace. Many WhatsApp users used it to avoid SMS/MMS charges, for which the J2ME UI was good enough to deliver tons of value, especially in low income areas.

I started working for a telco that had a lot of business in emerging (Asian) markets in 2009. Three months after whatsapp was founded. What I do remember from that period was how quickly smart phone prices fell and how rapidly they came to dominate much of the picture in just a few years.

The reason I asked is that working in the telco industry gave me a slightly different perspective on time. Nothing happens fast in the telco industry and what would take perhaps a quarter in my previous jobs could easily stretch out for a couple of years (for a number of reasons largely having to do with organizations that do not respond well to changes).

The reMarkable is very intentionally an e-ink notebook and very little else. If you want a device that can be tailored to solve more use cases, one of the e-ink Android tablets would probably be a better choice.

It is quite disappointing that they are trying to extract value via subscriptions for what is the functionality of a piece of hardware that they advertised.

So this made it much easier.

The product is sold with a feature that makes it possible to convert notes to text. This feature _only_ work when having a subscription. Ie. without a subscription the product is broken, as the advertised feature does not work.

I've recommended rM2 widely, and know of > 30 sales reMarkable made due to my recommendations. I will not be recommending it any longer.

And now... they want you to pay a subscription to access your Dropbox ? I'm guessing they spent too much money on marketing so now they need to recoup it somehow.

I've considered splurging on one of these and resisted at $400. Nearly $800 seems like a huge stretch.

Even if I was okay with this, it makes me worry about the long term survival of the company.

For myself, I have my own backups from installing rsync with toltec. It'll be a few years (hopefully more if the hardware lasts) before I need to find an alternative.

Remarkable seem like the type of company that are pouring money into marketing and not much else. To their detriment.

I bought a Remarkable 2 in September. Realized I did not want it, because it was missing a core feature I needed (the ability to search hand written notes, which Goodnotes does, Remarkable does not). Remarkable sends their products via DHL. Who, separately, are an awful shipment carrier.

I called DHL, to have them return to sender (requested by Remarkable). DHL, after 2 days failed to do this... they kept trying to contact whomever had the shipment... why they can't just mark it as return to sender in their system? No one knows.

The product arrived at my doorstep, no signature, just dropped on the porch. Okay.. great. I start the return process. It took Remarkable 4 days to get this process done. First day they email with a return portal, it couldn't find my purchase. Second day they finally respond to my plea for help and send a second portal. That one worked, but the Remarkable support team are terrible and sent incorrect instructions. 3rd day I finally got it squared away and they approved my return the 4th day, which I got shipped out on the 5th day (again via DHL). Oh, and one other mark against Remarkable, they kept referring to my return as "return for replacement" instead of "return for refund" so I had to correct them about 8 times to make sure they were actually going to refund instead of send me a replacement.

It arrives at a local hub. Where it is stuck for 30 days.

During this time, I call DHL to start an investigation as to why it's stalled. They spend 4 days unable to come up with an answer. Reach out to Remarkable again, they start their own investigation and say repeatedly that it is "on it's way." Meanwhile it doesn't move.

Now DHL is only Remarkable's problem in so far as they choose who their carrier is. I didn't get to choose to send it differently. So they can't control what DHL does, but they do need to take ownership of their terrible choice. IMO anyway, it's what I'd do as customer support.

While all this is happening, I'm asking for a refund because the product seems lost in shipment. Around day 20 I ask for a supervisor.

Supervisor responds twice, first time "we're issuing your refund and you should see it in 24 hours." then an hour later "We'll immediately issue you a refund when we receive the product which you'll see in 24-48 hours after."

After day 30 the product finally arrives in Hong Kong, they said 24-48 hours for a refund. 5 days later still no refund.

I thankfully, filed a dispute and it's being taken care of now. But my advice is avoid these clowns.

The product is kind of cool, but their support is awful. Their team is inept. They can't take responsibility for their shortcomings.

This was for a return, imagine dealing with this for an in warranty repair/replacement? Ugh. Awful.

To be clear, we're nearing 45 days from original cancellation and still no direct refund from Remarkable.

I get the feeling this company is going out of business.

1. How long is the term of the 'free' offer for existing users? No term is specified. Does that mean they will attempt billing (or cutoff service) after a year?

2. What exactly will happen to the existing online services, and when? They mention this is a transition but there's no timeline. Is this a new platform from scratch or just a paywall on what already exists?

read the terms carefully. They make no promises how long you'll get this for free...