100% agree, blatent monetisation of any community based project always leaves a bad taste and not helped by openhab’s version being out for while and free.
I’m sure I saw assurances of the HA cloud always being a free service in the pre release docs that were floating about.
As I’ve said before I can’t create anything but try to give back by helping others on here whenever I can like many others.
We just need to get your emulated_fixed fixed now 
@Bobby_Nobble Exactly. I was thinking the same thing. The more seasoned users offer free support which takes time and yet there’s no monetization of that time spent…now there is costs for operating cloud services and I get that, but Amazon, Google etc would take millions of words for their cloud services to reach $5 a month, so most of that cash isn’t going for paying for expenses. I’m really disappointed this is the approach the devs are taking on this 
1 buck a month is more than reasonable.
I think both sides have a point.
It is expected for open source to be free. I believe that this free and community based approach helped a lot home assistant in the early stages, specially when it had few platforms and many competitors that had better functionality at the time but required $. As a user, I have been using it for free for several years and just the mention of $ makes it feel wrong considering what has happened with different platforms that go down this route (Wink, canary, etc).
To be honest I wouldnt mind making some one-time donation or payment based on how much value I’ve taken from the platform; however I am not a fan of recurring payments.
Does it sound expensive? Yes, but still the point the developers made is that all other features will continue to be free and it’s just the cloud aspect that will require payment.
To me it sounds like they are targeting users that do not want to spend the time and effort configuring Haaska or any other integration with Alexa/Google. Just enter a username, a password and thats it. It does sound appealing but in my case I’d rather spend the time and use the $60/year to buy more devices.
The developers do have a point. Having thought about doing something like this myself they have to bear some costs. They need to be able to host the cloud application, store some data, pay for traffic, domain names, etc. If we all start using this for free then I can see their costs be significant based on the number of users and how much each user calls the service. (I know I use voice commands quite a bit).
I would love to see a breakdown of the costs or expected costs by the developers so we can understand why they justify a $5 price tag. I’d also like to know more about their approach to security because I wouldnt be surprised if hackers targeted them as an easy entry point to control/mess with multiple homes with relative ease.
I listened to Paulus on the most recent episode of the Home Assistant Podcast ( https://hasspodcast.io/ha015/ ) where he describes the model for the price of the cloud service. My own viewpoint is that this cloud service “value add” provides a convenient mechanism to do some fund raising for the project to help defer costs, along with conveying some optional incremental value to end-users.
On the cost end of things, I can easily understand both the direct costs of supporting the project – this web site community infrastructure as well as the HASS web site. There are hosting, bandwidth, domain registration and other direct costs that someone is presently paying for. There are also the indirect costs, which usually turn into hours of effort to keep all this stuff running, above and beyond the effort expended to create the software that’s shared with the rest of us.
A subscription model also makes managing the on-going expenses (some of which are recurring, periodic costs for bandwidth/hosting, etc.) a bit easier than trying to predict single donations.
So I see this effort as way to get incremental value via the first of many capabilities from this “cloud” offer, as well as a way to provide direct support of the project. What’s also different from the Ring scenario is there’s the element of choice here - just continue doing what you have been doing - with Ring, if you don’t pay the subscription, you don’t have anything useful, right? And ultimately, that’s the thing that closes the feedback loop. You can do it yourself and are not forced into a subscription model and held captive by it.
Another way to look at this is that you now have a “make” vs. “buy” decision when it comes to setting up this Alexa skill. You can do it all yourself, maybe figuring out how to get a Let’s Encrypt certificate, port forwarding on your routers, maybe setting up an nginx proxy, setting up Haska, etc… or pay $5 a month to avoid all that. Do the math and figure out if it makes sense. Or heck, you get to try it for free before you need to decide…
From my view, I think I get more than $5 of value from Home Assistant in my life, so on that basis alone, it makes sense to me. Others might disagree.
@lmamakos I’m pretty sure your statement about Ring is untrue. Without the monthly fee you don’t get cloud services but it doesn’t render the doorbell or camera useless. Besides, Ring has a lot more expenses with bandwidth and storing your videos for 6 months. Not to mention technical support etc. So if you can get all that for $3 a month, $5 with very low per user costs, is a bit excessive. Considering technical support is basically community based, it’s a lot of money in the pocket of the devs and nothing for the people contributing in other ways.
Again, I don’t mind paying something, but there has to be a one time up front fee for the life of the project as on option. That or consider a much lower monthly cost or yearly subscription of $10 kind of thing. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.
$60/yr is a conscious purchasing decision for most people, $10 is a yeh why not it’s for a good cause amount and am fairly sure they’d get a lot more than 6 times the number of subscribers if they did that as well as a lot of good feeling, rather than all the negative this will cause as users will feel they have a right to whinge if they’re paying for it and killing the community spirit.
Also not clever dangling the carrot in the two main posts launching this but it’s not till you get to the third that a cost is mentioned.
What? I will need to pay for this? That’s a bombshell. I guess Haaska it is for me.
I just spent one whole day trying to get Haaska running but failed 
@masterkenobi - take a look here: Haaska help please?
I got very close; and would be happy to help you get to thge same stage - perhaps we can work together to get over the final hurdle…
Thanks. Will give it a try later. Need to rest awhile.
anyway, i just tried the HA cloud. It was amazingly easy. every devices in my HA is discovered just like that (except climate devices). The discovered devices also works well with Alexa-enabled smart home group in Alexa app. Unlike emulated Hue, my TVs are identified as TV, not as light anymore. That means, if I created an Alexa-enabled group and add my devices as follows…
Group name: Living Room (linked to Echo in Living Room)
Device names:
I can now tell my Echo in living room to turn on the TV by simply saying “Alexa, turn on TV” instead of “Living Room TV”.
If I do the same for my other Echos in other rooms, for example in my bedroom, I can turn on the bedroom TV using the same command too; “Alexa, turn on TV”.
Unfortunately, it only works for TV and lights. It doesn’t work on fans, speaker and air conditional yet.
@masterkenobi I agree, it does work very well with little setup. Can’t get my head around $5 a month for turning on a handful of devices. I’ll be looking at other solutions. Really sucks because I was hopeful on finally getting a real Alexa implementation with this until the price bomb got dropped on us!
Have you been able to get a cover to work? It discovers my garage fine. I set it as type door and that shows up but Alexa says garage doesn’t support that when I say open the the garage. And she says garage Isint responding if I say turn on garage (emulated hue works perfect with turn on garage)
Sorry. I don’t have cover component to play with.
Same here. Were you guys able to get the exclusions to work? I tried excluding Automatons but it still brings them in!!
It doesn’t work for me too. I exclude every domains and use alexa_hidden: false in customize section to expose those entities I want but it doesn’t work.
Well I will stick with Hue emulator until exclusions work. seems cool but not ready for Prime time and specially if the want $5 a month every darn thing should work like a champ!!!
@masterkenobi @subnetangel
So here’s what I found with exclusions. It does work but the issue is if you have added it and then try to delete the device from the Alexa app, it doesn’t actually delete them. Log into it from a web browser at Alexa.amazon.com and “forget” the device. Then it will be truly gone and on next discover devices it won’t find anything you’ve excluded in HA. Basically the issue is more with the Alexa app.
Yep, they’ve managed to create the same stupid situation as Harmony have with there web and app versions of set up. You can’t do everything in just one and often need both open in front of you to complete something that should be simple.
