At the moment I have the following home automation devices: Google Home, Philips Hue hub/bulbs/dimmers/motion sensors and a Nest stat. I’m currently using the associated separate apps to control things which is okay but I’ll soon be moving house and increasing my home automation with Shelly Dimmer modules and other motion sensors.
For this reason, I’ve been looking at switching over to Home Assistant to one stop shop for all the home automation controls. I’ve watched various tutorial videos online that go through the setup and installing of recommended add on. One that is very common for setting up nice looking dashboards seems to be Lovelace.
My questions are:
Are there any common add-ons that will require monthly subscription?
What about Lovelace?
If there is a fee, are there any other free alternatives that will give me nice looking dashboards?
as David said everything is available freely.
if you want to use nabu casa for easy external access and to contribute towards the project, theres small monthly fee for that.
also, lovelace isnt an addon as such, its the name of the standard frontend for home assistant
I don’t know any paid additions to HA, especially never heard of paid GUI.
But imo “nice looking” dashboard is hard to achieve with vanilla lovelace which is very limited. To achieve what you often see on screenshots you have to incorporate many additions to lovelace, which are free but require a lot of effort to make your whole UI “nice looking”. The time needed to learn things and configure gui to your needs might be huge investmemt. may be more expensive at the end than imaginary paid addon
I have been paid to design user interfaces in the past, the mainstream professional home automation industry also charges to program/setup remotes, controllers, and touch screen interfaces. In several cases I have been brought in by the customer to “fix” things that just are not working for them, either due to a misunderstanding of their needs by the installer, or by mistakes.
The main difference there is that you do not have the option of doing that work yourself, since it requires specialized software interfaces or hidden knowledge. However with Home Assistant you of course have the option of having someone consult for design ideas for a fee, or even having them setup the lovelace dashboard. You could even have someone program all your automations for you, and since HA is an open platform, use that as the starting point and skip a lot of the setup work.
While this forum is a great resource for doing things yourself, the end result may not meet your expectations without some serious time and knowledge investment on your end.
There is no reason at all to pay someone to set this up or to start getting used to configuring automations.
Follow the official guides, if you get stuck ask here in the forums. Then start slowly by adding a bit at a time.
If you have any tech knowledge at all you should get the hang of things.
And as has been said, HA is all free, lovelace dashboards and add-ons included.
But if you really think you can’t do it then feel free to pay someone. But TBH, the easiest part is the initial setup and basic automations. If you need to pay someone to do the basic stuff then there is no way you’ll be able to do the advanced stuff and you will need to be resigned to the fact that you’ll need a long term service contract just to maintain your system.
But I’m fairly confident you can figure it out, especially with help here as long as you give it a try on your own. And if not at least the investment is pretty small to get started on your own. It would only be worse if you paid someone to do it then found you didn’t like it after that.
I know that wasn’t the initial question but I didn’t want you to get spooked into the idea that you needed to pay someone to do any of this.