I’ve got the first one, too, and I got exempt from the subscription fee. I thought that was the case for all first gen owners?
This one is tempting. Not only color, but also one of the few eink devices with >10" screen. Also, Remarkable doesn’t put the screen behind a thick glass like Boox does, so there is no pen parallax.
I’ve never looked into the subscription thing Remarkable does. Afaik it’s only for the cloud storage - is it mandatory now?