Home Assistant's paid online service is about to stop being called a cloud. Nabu Casa, the company that runs the subscription, is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link.
The first problem, according to Nabu Casa, was a mixed message. Paulus Schoutsen, Home Assistant's founder and president of the Open Home Foundation, sometimes found himself telling an audience to avoid products that need the cloud to work and then explaining how Home Assistant Cloud is different. The second was plain confusion, because some new users took the service for a way to run Home Assistant itself in the cloud. Nabu Casa says that has never been how it works, since Home Assistant is meant to run locally, at home.
Nabu Casa frames the rename as a statement of values. It sets Link against what it calls a Big Tech cloud: Link is optional, so the smart home keeps working without it, nobody is locked in, and most subscription profit goes to the Open Home Foundation, the nonprofit behind the project. The company also says data sent through Link is encrypted and that only the user holds the key. The comparison is against a generic Big Tech service rather than a named product, and every line of it is Nabu Casa's own characterization.
The changeover already has a date on Nabu Casa's Link page: December 2. The same page lists the monthly plan at €7.50 (about $8.42) after a 31-day trial that needs no card. The annual plan is €75 (about $84), priced as ten months. Listed benefits include remote access, offsite backups, Alexa and Google Home control, speech processing, smoother camera and music streaming, and support limited to Link features.
Alongside the rename, Nabu Casa points to work it says is already in place: a new account page, a speech-to-text test in Labs, a new settings page in Home Assistant with a setup wizard, and a backend move to bare-metal servers that tries to connect each user to the closest one. It also says online speech-to-text tends to be faster, to cover more languages and to be more reliable than self-hosted alternatives, and offers no benchmark for that.
Carl Albertsson, Nabu Casa's vice president of commercial, says the company intends to make the change official in the December release and wants community feedback well before then. With a changeover date already published, it is unclear how much room that feedback leaves to change the name.
