Just read that SmartThings is moving to a paid subscription starting Oct 2026.
Has anyone used “samsungrac” successfully? Or is there any other alternative?
I have several Samsung wall air conditioners and a Samsung heatpump all working in SmartThings at the moment and a couple of them already brought into HA but don’t want to add remaining units since SmartThings cloud is going to a monthly subscription 
I went the other way when I left SmartThings: my three LG units have no network link to HA at all, each room has a Zigbee IR blaster (Tuya TS1201 on Zigbee2MQTT) replaying codes learned from the remote, and that works the same for a Samsung as long as it came with a remote. Temperature and presence sensors decide when, and over the last 7 days HA cycled the bedroom unit 56 times and the living room one 53 times. The catch is that IR is one way, so HA only assumes the state, and once someone used the real remote and a unit ran 21 hours before I noticed. Since then the off rule ignores the assumed state and just sends off whenever the room drops below 26.5 C.
Interesting 
… I guess we will soon find out how many will migrate to this once SmartThings initiates their monthly charges.
Thank you 
This might not be my solution since my units will be unattended for several months at a time with no physical access.
Thank you
I am not sure if I am missunderstanding this whole issue, but my take was, that only the API to use Smarthings in HA would be subject to a monthly subscription.
Are you guys saying that I will have to pay for access through the phone app of Smarthings as well?
You’ll have to pay for access for every API call except through the phone app of Smarthings
You can use a power monitoring plug or other power monitoring device to determine if the device is running or not. Then use the power consumption as a condition in your automations.
For an unattended place the useful property is that an off code isn’t a toggle, so it’s safe to send without knowing the state, the only cost is a beep from the unit. Mine checks every 10 minutes against the Zigbee temperature/humidity sensor in each room and sends off when the room is under its threshold and either HA believes the unit has run for an hour or the room has kept dropping more than 0.5 C over 3 hours, which is my stand-in for someone using the real remote; that fired 125 times across three units in the last 7 days, and a no-questions-asked off at 07:30 ran on all 7. Only the temperature is any use for that, relative humidity goes up while the unit cools the room, so an off rule based on it never fires. So I oversimplified in my post above, the rule doesn’t ignore the assumed state, it just doesn’t depend on it. What I still can’t do is confirm the unit really went off, which is what @PCO’s power monitoring solves, but mine are ceiling units wired straight in with no plug to meter, so I’ve never tested that.