In the past I've been really impressed by Brother products so I'm surprised to hear about their subscription model.
What benefits (if any) does the subscription offer?
It's maybe different business units. I have a couple industrial label printers from Brother, and although some of the software decisions are weird, there's no subscriptions or stuff like that.
I think they didn't intend for the bluetooth protocol to be reverse engineered. The free version of the software you really can't do much (limited colors, tools). I believe they also have some clip-art that they make available with the subscription. It's pretty bad.