Braindump: The NabuCasa/HomeAssistant relationship (observations, questions, ideas)

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During the recent events around the 2025.1 release (and especially its accompanying 1300+ entries long behemoth of a forum thread), I stumbled over a few things in the relationship between Nabu Casa and Home Assistant that left me thinking. On the surface things should be pretty straightforward, but the backup topic surfaced what I would call unclarities and also areas of improvements. So I decided to write things down a bit.

Disclaimer: this is a simplified write-up, mostly based on my observations, and some available online sources from HA and NC. It’s furthermore simplified by letting out the role of the Open Home Foundation almost entirely.

Full disclosure: I applied for a role at Nabu Casa in the past, and didn’t get the job. So I’m in no way a neutral person. This might impact my wording here and there, but I’m still reasonably convinced that the underlying foundation of my writing holds up. Please let me know where it doesn’t, seriously. I don’t see this as a conflict of interest, as we all (including me :slight_smile: ) want Home Assistant to be as awesome as possible.

Let’s start with the official wording found in https://www.nabucasa.com/about/:

„Nabu Casa, Inc. commits time and resources into Home Assistant so this will be a shared success story. We want to improve Home Assistant, also for the people that are not customers of Nabu Casa, Inc.

  • We are contributing features to Home Assistant to make it easier to install, manage and be accessible to a wider audience.

  • We are responsible for hosting the Home Assistant Community so that it can remain an ad-free experience.

  • All integrations with cloud partners (Amazon, Google, future ones) will be contributed to Home Assistant so people can run their own. „

To rephrase and extend things a bit from my perspective:

  1. The employees of Nabu Casa make sure that the foundations of Home Assistant are uptodate, to everyone’s advantage. High-level architectural changes, data structure and management, event handling, etcetc. And they do the boring / „un-sexy“ stuff that usually nobody has an intrinsic interest in, while making sure that despite the open source nature of HA all the individual bits & pieces still align.

  2. Nabu Casa doesn’t create a „walled garden“ of features or (physical) products for HA. There are other ways to remotely access your HA instance, there are other ways to build voice assistants, there are other ways to create cloud backups, and you can run HA on any random Raspberry. There are alternatives available for everything that Nacu Casa offers. They just make things easier for the non-techy part of the users, increasing the size of the potential target group in the process.

  3. Nabu Casa has an interest in making/keeping Home Assistant an important player in the smart home field, for multiple reasons, e.g.:

  • continuous and growing revenue stream for NC to keep the foundation solid and to have a budget for keeping up with technical developments (voice, llm, …)
  • HA being important/big enough to „have a seat at the table“ when it comes to industry standards like Matter, and for initiatives like „runs with Home Assistant“ to be taken serious

Where I feel it’s getting tricky a bit: Nabu Casa in some areas is run like a normal tech company (surprise! :wink: ). Which comes with some „best practices“ that are not specific to Nabu Casa, but sometimes clash a bit with the very open-source community-driven vibe of Home Assistant itself.

Examples:

  • „big bang“ releases for new products (to ensure omni-present media coverage as much as possible)

  • a certain level of upfront-secrecy to built the suspense needed for those releases

And one potential for conflict that is also not specific to Nabu Casa, but common for the combination „big open source project PLUS an enterprise behind it“:

  • valid(!!!) monetary and capacity-related priorities and decisions that are sometimes primarily tied to the well-being of the company, but wouldn’t be the first choice of the HA community

The whole topic around encrypted cloud backups seems to be the best example for that: making backups encrypted by default enables Nabu Casa to enhance their service offering, as dealing with unencrypted user data on your servers is one hell of a mess, effort- and legal-wise. Were encrypted cloud backups the most called-for requests during WTH months and in the feature request board? No. Was ist important for extending the business opportunities for Nabu Casa: quite certainly.

Where it gets extra tricky then is when the communication and participation processes are somehow trying to cater to both entities, the open-source project and the tech company.

The product team in Nabu Casa has taken quite some steps in 2024 to communicate a roadmap, and to provide updates. Still the topic of the encrypted backups is not listed in the visual overview published in November in https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/, but only to a certain extent mentioned in writing further down in the article.
The voice hardware (which is not targeting specifically NC subscribers) made its first visual appearance in a reddit thread where someone had shared photos from an FCC approval document.

To not just nag, but to also get some clarity into things, and maybe to even improve things here and there:

How about more prominently communicating the primarily NC-driven developments as part of the overall roadmap? (e.g. as part of a fifth stream below „research“ which could be called „business/foundation“ or something similar)

How about adding a more prominent „preview“ section to the end of the release party live streams? (which would surface more high level feedback on in-development topics before the beta phase)

How about an overall bigger transparency around how priority decisions for the items on the roadmap are made?

What are the ways that currently user input makes it into product and development decisions, and how can people proactively chime in if they want to?

Also: from what I see in live stream chats and facebook comments etc, HA/NC seems to have quite a good relationship with basically every important smart home youtuber etc. Is there maybe an approach that gives more insights to the community early on into things like the voice hardware, while still creating a concentrated media buzz for new fancy stuff when it’s ready to hit the stores?

If you made it that far: thanks for reading :slight_smile: Curious about your thoughts. And the corrections on things I got factually wrong, please!

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Guess you were so busy writing this very long piece that you failed to notice that in the current beta release Nabu Casa addressed ALL feedback that was given on the MVP backup feature, invalidating your whole ‘best’ example? And posted about this, pre release, right here on this forum? It shows you can chime in here just fine. Also with the month of WTH right here, of which several requests got implemented right away.

I would also like to note that without Nabu Casa trying to create value in their offerings, they would wither and not be able to build you anything at all. So as long as they keep proving that they never do so without allowing others to do the same (or users to do it themselves) they are welcome to do so.

To use your own example: Local Samba storage and other cloud providers are included as backup options, so you are in no way forced to support Nabu Casa in their contribution. Encryption is common sense when you store personal data and especially all kinds of credentials online, but you can turn it off for local if you want to.

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While i agree that the feedback that came up after 2025.1 was addressed, you seem to be missing my point. I didn’t bring the backup topic to say that people are not listening to feedback that is given after release. I mentioned it as an example where the decision to work on backups AT ALL at this point in time was probably primarily driven by NC-priorities. And that transparency upfront about reasons and plans would have improved the whole process, for everyone.

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I fully agree. And l like that concept. I might have to clarify things a bit in the original post, but just quickly here specifically: a lot in the post is just stating the status quo. I dont criticise everything just by mentioning it

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See what I edited in later. I see you did. You cannot blame them for trying to build a sustainable business. They owe that to their employees too, who depend on NC for their income. But they do so in a responsible way, allowing people to choose a different path if they want to. What they do to sustain themselves is up to them to decide, and they do listen. Every month a major release, every month a chance to shape the next step.

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I don’t blame Nabu Casa for the business model, or what they provide. I e.g. think that choosing encrypted backups for the NC backup and offering was a good and right decision. I only wanted to address part of the process and communication around it.

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NC’s vision on the Open Home is quite clear, and I never ever saw Nabu Casa do anything that contradicts that vision. Compare that to any other big tech firm. Those are all really in it for the money and that shows. So to me, Nabu Casa is exemplary in their integrity. Does that mean I would make the same choices? Definitely not. But I respect their choices nonetheless, and I fully enjoy the changes that fall my way.

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Edwin, i seriously think that we are completely aligned actually :slight_smile: Too bad we cant have this conversation in real life

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Mostly true. Except maybe for the prior input part.

Take the efforts towards Voice and everything around it. Was it the most requested feature? Probably not. But if there is ever a thing in Home Automation that is almost impossible to do right without needing Big Tech then this is it.

It requires vast investments in effort and money, and Nabu casa is putting in every bit of weight they have to break us free. Local TTS, STT, LLM… But people would never use it without it being easy and without nice hardware. That is where their hardware fits in. They show it can be done and pave the way. It also generates income for the rest of their vision.

And, albeit cloud, allowing to do some of these things without effort through their subscription also fits in. The substancial difference is the business model. NC cloud is payed cloud, so you are not the product.

Plus you are free to do the same. Commercial use of HA is allowed, mind you.

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Also there we’re actually aligned :slight_smile: I was also there not questioning the project/decision in itself. I just see advantages in trying to still keep as much as possible of the “big bang” effect of the release, AND being a bit more open about specs, hardware etc sooner in the process. And i might be wrong there, maybe in the year 2024/2025 it doesnt work without as much secrecy as possible when you want to launch a successful hardware product. Would be rather sad, but might be the case.

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I think what we’re seeing is that the developers don’t always know how people use features like backups, but once they do, they do what they can to give people what they want. As well, I suspect that many people don’t really understand that protecting the content of a backup is a part of protecting your privacy and Home Assistant instance security, whereas the developers do consider it an important thing to do. There is also the dilemma of how much information to reveal at what point because if they say they plan to add something and it doesn’t make it in when they say it will, people will think they’re not intending to do it or something.