I don't buy the excuse that increasing server-side data like this should mean having to pay this much more... and I'll explain why:

Right now there are two subscription options: Basic and Full.
- Basic gets you 1 character per server with a max of 8 characters across all servers
- Full gets you 8 characters per server with a max of 40(?) characters across all servers

Full costs $3 more per month than Basic.

So eight characters with two retainers each would be 16 retainers (no additional ones purchased) for $3/month over the Basic price. That's an absolute TON of extra data compared to just a bunch of retainers on a single character. Besides all the retainer data, it's also full character data for seven additional characters. But adding 6 retainers to a Basic account doubles the subscription fee? Nope. I don't buy it.

Furthermore because we can't share inventories or mail between alts outside of some personal FC shenanigans (which precludes you from joining an FC to pull off), we don't even have the choice to pay for the more efficient option to expand inventory space. All this ostensibly to curb rmt activities.... yeah that's going really well.

So no. If these end up doubling the sub fee for Basic-level players, it's just greed. There's no technical reason for this that makes any sense at all. SE just wants more money from you and they've figured out how to get it.

Not even free-to-play games charge you MONTHLY for your expanded inventory space.