From ever-increasing subscription prices to outages and data harvesting: we don’t like what the cloud has come to represent. So we’re redefining what an online service should be: private, optional, and free from lock-in or walled gardens.
That’s why today Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to more accurately describe what the service actually does, and to better reflect our values. Allow us to introduce:
Home Assistant Link
I’m Carl, Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa. You probably know us as the folks making all that sleek, highly optimized Home Assistant hardware. Beyond hardware, we also manage and run Home Assistant Link, and as one of the Open Home Foundation’s commercial partners, we’re here to help fund all their amazing work. We feel pretty passionately about the word cloud, and we’d love to explain how the old name never fit, and why Link finally does.
Created for the community
Home Assistant began with a group of core developers working nights and weekends alongside their regular jobs to create the platform – a good recipe for burnout, and one that has ended plenty of similar open source projects. So in 2018, we founded Nabu Casa and created Home Assistant Cloud to make sure that didn’t happen.
Home Assistant Cloud set out to make Home Assistant easier for more people to use, starting with a problem many of you had: reaching your Home Assistant when you’re not at home, without having to spend a weekend on it. It was also built to make Home Assistant’s development sustainable.
The intent was never to just ask for donations, but to build an optional service that benefited the community and funded the work at the same time. The majority of profits from subscriptions now fund the Open Home Foundation. That money supports everyone working on Home Assistant – from salaried staff to volunteers – keeping the project sustainable. That shift took Home Assistant from a passion project to one that could invest back into its community, and one that could stick around for the long haul.
A breath of fresh air
We even took it out of the Nabu Casa logo… did we take this too far? 🤔
We had a service that we and the community loved, but the name just didn’t feel right. For example, there were times when Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and President of the Open Home Foundation, was on stage saying “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work,” then in the next breath having to explain how Home Assistant Cloud is different, despite the name. That created unnecessary friction.
It also caused confusion, since some new users thought (and continue to think) Home Assistant Cloud is a way to run Home Assistant in the cloud. This has never been the case, because we believe Home Assistant should always be run locally, in your home.
Big Tech has given the cloud a bad name, and while Link does run online, it is very different from other cloud-powered smart home services:
Home Assistant Link A Big Tech cloud Optional: your smart home will still work without it, lights and all. Required: all or most features won’t work without it. No lock-in: you can use this service or someone else’s, and you’ll never be stuck. A walled garden: you’ll be locked into that one service, and all its outages or price increases. Your data’s private: your data is yours, and will always stay that way. Your data’s monetized: you’re the product, and your data is used for ads, AI training, and sometimes sold to third parties. Funds a nonprofit: Nabu Casa contributes the majority of profits from subscriptions to the Open Home Foundation, supporting their fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability. Funds investors first: profits flow to shareholders, debt repayment, and a bunch of other stuff first, and funding developers is an afterthought.Your subscriptions help sustain Home Assistant, but we’ve been clear from the beginning that you do not need Link to use the platform. We hate what Big Tech has done to smart devices, turning them into paperweights when they drop support. Thermostats that can’t be scheduled or cameras that can’t detect motion, giving the smart home a bad reputation and making a mountain of e-waste. By not using Link, you’ll miss out on some extras, but that’s all they are: extras. And if you do use Link but have to unsubscribe, your smart home will keep working.
Big Tech treats your data as a commodity and a tool for mass surveillance: sold to advertisers, used to train AI, and dealt to third parties for the best price. We think this is morally bankrupt. That’s why when you use Home Assistant Link, your data is encrypted, and only you have the key. Neither Nabu Casa nor the Open Home Foundation want your data, and we work hard to never have an opportunity to see it.
This is what tech serving people looks like: data that’s yours, and a smart home that answers to you – not corporate shareholders.
Choose your own path
Many of you build DIY projects to customize your setup, and Home Assistant isn’t going anywhere on that front. But for those who’d like a simpler approach, Link makes using Home Assistant easier, opening up the local and private smart home to more people. For example, connecting to Alexa and Google Home can be complex to set up yourself, but Link allows you to… ahem… link them to Home Assistant without the hassle. Not having the time or know-how shouldn’t be a barrier to using the platform, and Link ensures it isn’t.
On top of things that can only be done online, there are other features that just work better with Link’s connected services. For instance, online speech-to-text tends to be faster, supports more languages, and is more reliable than self-hosted alternatives. Likewise, Link offers a way to store a backup online, so your data is always recoverable while remaining private. Plus, if you run into trouble with a feature, we have real humans you can contact to help you out. You heard that right. A real person.
See everything at a glance on our new account page.
We’re also constantly improving the service and are now working to add new features. You may have noticed the new, easier-to-use account page, the speech-to-text Labs test, or the new settings page in Home Assistant with a setup wizard. What you probably won’t notice is the massive backend update to improve the responsiveness of your remote access (we’ve migrated to a new bare-metal setup that always tries to get you on the closest server, and it’s fast 🏎️). Most importantly, these updates let us add new security features, account management tools, and more.
What’s in a name?
In the end, our actions speak louder than product names, and we’ll continue to run a subscription that’s about privacy, transparency, and not locking users in, all the while supporting the development of Home Assistant.
Whenever features get renamed, we always come to you, the community, first. Even though this is a service from Nabu Casa, Home Assistant is a community project, and we value your opinion and thoughts. Love the new name? Something we didn’t consider? We’re all ears. We intend to make the name change official in the December 2026.12 release, so please provide all your feedback well before then! 👇
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2026/10/02/big-tech-ruined-the-cloud-so-were-renaming-ours/
