Good e-Reader broke the news last month that Remarkable was secretly developing a new subscription system that would give premium access to paid users. The company has now officially unveiled two different tiers that would only apply to people who have never had a Remarkable before and purchases it after October 12th, 2021. In order to sweeten the deal, new users can get $100 discount off the purchase of a reMarkable 2 and $50 off premium accessories. Existing Remarkable 1 and Remarkable 2 users will get all access levels for free.
There are two membership plans that are currently available. The first paid tier is called Connect Lite and gives you all of your notes in one place and unlimited cloud storage on the Remarkable servers, this costs $4.99 per month. Connect is their highest tier membership and gives you all of your notes in one place, unlimited Remarkable cloud storage, Google Drive and Dropbox integration, handwriting conversion, screen share and more powerful features in the future, this will cost $7.99 per month. If you feel a subscription is not right for you, then you can still take notes, read web articles and ebooks, annotate PDFs and organize all your notes on a device designed without distractions with the free plan.
In the future the company plans on introducing more paid tools and further integrations. The rollout of their paid membership platform is just the first step. Remarkable has not disclosed what plans they have to expand their paid offerings, but I am sure they want to add more compelling value.
Remarkable only has two hardware devices in their portfolio and their first genertion model was recently discontinued, but will still be supported for a number of years. The company only made money if you bought a device and accessories. The reoccurring subscription model gives them some flexibility to continue to generate revenue from new users, giving them growth protentional.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
