If you pay reMarkable every month, the feature you are almost certainly paying for is handwriting search. That is the half gemnotes replaces, on your own computer, with no subscription. The other half is cloud sync, and we do not replace it at all. This page says which is which, including the parts where the honest answer is “not yet”.
If you subscribe to find things you wrote: gemnotes does that without a subscription and without uploading anything. Recognition runs on your machine. If you have not settled on an approach yet, the wider version is how to search your handwritten notes.
If you subscribe so your notebooks stay in the cloud: keep paying. gemnotes is not a sync service and has no cloud. Cancelling Connect changes what reMarkable keeps for you, and nothing on this page changes that.
If you write on a reMarkable today: read the row about live writing in the table below before you plan anything. gemnotes reads reMarkable files; it does not yet write on a reMarkable.
| What you want | reMarkable Connect | gemnotes |
|---|---|---|
| Search your handwriting | Included, and it is the headline feature of the paid tier. It arrived in software 3.22 in September 2025, as a beta for Connect subscribers, rolled out gradually. | Yes, and across every notebook and every device at once, in one index. Measured: 87.5% of words exactly right on a real handwritten line. |
| Where recognition runs | Their cloud, not the tablet. Community documentation of the cloud service reports the recognition is performed by a third party, MyScript. See what your tablet sends home. | Your own computer. The recognition call goes to 127.0.0.1 and you can watch it with tcpdump. See security. |
| Recurring cost | $3.99 / month as of March 2026, up from $2.99, about a 33% rise, and the community said so loudly. Check reMarkable's own page for today's number. | No subscription. Software pricing is still a draft and is written down as a draft on status. |
| Handwriting → text | Free, no subscription needed. Not what you are paying for. | Yes, and the original ink is kept. Machine text never replaces what you wrote. |
| Cloud sync and backup | Included, and it is the real reason many people stay. Without it, reMarkable's free tier stops keeping a file in the cloud once it has gone long enough without being opened. | No. gemnotes has no cloud and no account. Your archive lives on your machine and your backup is your own. |
| Works across brands | reMarkable devices only. | One index over more than one manufacturer. That is the part a device maker structurally cannot sell you. |
| Writing live on a reMarkable | Yes, obviously. It is their tablet. | Not yet. Live writing works on Boox today. reMarkable comes in as files: .rm v6 is read directly, the strokes rather than a flattened image, verified against four real files from the community test suite. |
| Supernote, Kindle Scribe | Not applicable. | Not read yet. Listed as NOT YET on status, not as coming soon. |
| Notes you wrote years ago | Handwriting is analysed as notes are created, so an older archive can take a while before it is all searchable, if it gets there at all. | The backlog is the point, not an afterthought. A real archive run: 11 pages, 27 regions indexed, and three phrases that had been unfindable by text before came back with the page they were written on. |
| Feeding other tools | Exports to Slack, Miro and similar. | A local MCP server, so anything on the same machine can query the index. Nothing goes out to a third party to make that work. |
The question this subscription answers was asked publicly for seven years before it was answered, and the counting is on the retrieval guide. What matters here is the shape of the answer when it came: not a firmware update everyone got, but a beta inside a paid tier.
“I have a reMarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible.”
Search on your own machine is not a feature reMarkable is late to ship. It is a feature that would compete with the subscription they sell, on hardware they would rather you replaced. That is not a criticism of them; it is just where the incentive points. It is also the only reason a small project gets to stand here at all.
Which cuts both ways, and the honest version is on why this exists: three tablets, each solving the wrong half. If you are weighing the hardware rather than the subscription, the device-by-device version is reMarkable alternatives, honestly compared.
For search, yes: gemnotes searches your handwriting on your own computer with no subscription. For cloud storage, no. Connect also keeps your notebooks synced and backed up on reMarkable's servers, and gemnotes has no cloud at all. Cancelling changes what reMarkable keeps for you. Decide those two separately.
It reads reMarkable files today. .rm v6 is parsed directly as strokes rather than as a flattened image, verified against four real files from the community test suite. Writing live on a reMarkable is not supported; that works on Boox. If live writing is what you need, gemnotes is not there yet.
No. Recognition runs on your machine and the call goes to 127.0.0.1. You do not have to take our word for it: run tcpdump, Little Snitch, or your router's log while gemnotes reads a page. Security lists the four claims and how to check each one.
Maybe not. Connect analyses handwriting as notes are created, which is the right design for what you write tomorrow and the wrong one for the eight years already sitting in your account. gemnotes indexes an existing archive as a batch, because that pile is the reason people go looking in the first place.
Handwriting-to-text is a commodity in 2026: reMarkable gives it away, a general chat assistant will do it, and there are free self-hosted versions. What is not a commodity is retrieval that spans every notebook and every device you own, runs locally, and keeps the strokes so a diagram stays a diagram. That is the part worth building.
Nothing is being sold yet. Software pricing is a draft and is marked as a draft on status; the notebook on device is not manufactured and takes no payment. When that changes, it will change on those pages first.
Every number on this page comes from what's actually running, which lists NOT YET items next to the working ones, including a stroke classifier whose first attempt scored zero. If a number is not there, we do not quote it.