I’m a software engineer who is looking to do something different.
My partner and I are looking to start a SAAS business, but I find myself constantly drawn to tinkering in home assistant when I should be writing code for something else! I’m sure many of us have caught that bug.
As a result it’s got me thinking since I seem to enjoy this so much, is it something I could make a living out of? I’m constantly blown away by what can be achieved with home assistant and the flexibility it gives you.
I suspect the answer is probably no. I’m in the UK and think the market is likely pretty small and those who are really interested in it are probably drawn to tinker themselves. Perhaps there would be some high net worth individuals interested but perhaps not that many.
I’d love to put it out for discussion and hear from other people! Are you currently doing it? Have you tried and found it’s not viable for anything more than a hobby? Would be helpful to know what geography you are in and any lessons learnt or insights.
Apologies if this isn’t the correct sub, it seemed the closest.
The danger with HA is that you might get in trouble with your customers if they are allowed to buy stuff you then need to implement.
I order to avoid that you could control what they can buy, but then they expect it to be available right away and just work, so you would have to go with known brands.
Known brands are more expensive and you will therefore get close to the products other installers use, so the competitive advantage of HA is gone.
I know what it takes to keep the wife happy with HA additions/changes.
As much as I love my family, I would never set up HA for them either. They need a system they are comfortable controlling and changing. I send them to Simply Safe and Blink. They can flip switches!
No way I’d try to do that with an external customer without a VERY SPECIFIC contract.
Agreed. If you charge for customer support for HomeAssistant setups by the hour, you will be a gazillionare.
I got $600 an hour for Y2K consulting work in '99 and they were delighted to pay that. Got a lot if customers out of a pickle. Long dormant COBOL skills to the fore. You need to understand Python for HomeAssistant scenarios.
Having some hardware and trades skills or ready access to experienced tradesman will round out your team to be able to offer what the customer needs.
The rapid pace of change and volunteer based code detracts and makes it hard to take responsibility for things you have no control over, so most integrators stick to a known working environment that is robust and stable and a lot more expensive but you can pin your reputation on it. Your mark of professionalism is to document everything so the customer can take over or you can pass the project to somebody else, otherwise expect 3am calls when an update breaks everything.
You also need to be across industry developments as a resourceful customer asks you about new options or hardware that is still at the announce stage but not released and you are expected to offer sage advice.
2038 coming up! Plenty of work for that already in the pipeline. At least you won’t have to break out the old 8" floppy drives to read esotoric disk formats, or OCR dusty 132 column printouts for source code to recompile for four digit years.
FORTRAN for string manipulation was always a challenge. A GUI for COBOL too. dBase exports to csv format, a tweak with a column based file editor, and re-import to more modern accounting packages by contrast was far easier. Some customers were happy to move to new packages with existing data, while others wanted to keep their existing software, just fix the two digits to four and fix up the backend data. Finding the latest patches to Turbo Pascal to recompile ancient source code off 5" floppies was often the challenge there.
I’ve worked a number of careers, and the skills gained in one are useful for all the others. You pay somebody for experience and wisdom and life skills seems to be something you pick up as a bonus.
Consulting can be challenging, but also rewarding, not only financially, but job satisfaction as you provide custom solutions to unique requirements. Always strive for 110%. Never offer hobbyist quality items for professional, well paying customers with high expectations.
If you just want to fiddle with lots of home automation at the hobbyist level, join the local men’s group and have fun there. Word of mouth will soon bring you side jobs as your skills and experience grows.
Getting good pay to do something for work that you play with is just the top level on Maslow’s Triangle.
We’re doing a small start up in Singapore helping our customers get started with smart homes during their renovations, and also setting up Home Assistant for them!
There has been quite a bit of interest and we strongly feel that not being vendor locked in is such an important thing that customers should know about.
At this time, it’s still not quite ‘making a living’ out of it yet because of how new we are.
In my country, has many small company sell hardware and then install HA for user, but they decide/tell what the hardware must bought to make sure everything will working smooth together, of course, hardware price follow the market, but they count the price for consultant, integration and installation, I think if you want to make a living, follow that path.
This is possible with any equipment or install. Customer can and does come in and start breaking things. It becomes necessary to determine what is abuse, covered by warranty or covered under service contract. These things are very common. As long as things are clearly defined in contract you don’t generally end up in a mess. Some people are just litigious and nothing you can do will avoid that problem but this could happen with anything. HA doesn’t make things special.
Doing home automation design, installation and maintenance since 30 years here, first with closed and crap AMX/Crestron systems and then switched to HA as soon as it was a viable solution for customers. Now we have completely switched away of these proprietary systems and working only with HA for our customers. We have some customers migrated since 5 years now and so happy with it (both us as maintainer of system and customer for its reliability).
Also the great point with HA is that we are doing a lot more than with traditional systems that are overcomplicated, suffer of a terrible history, stupidely expensive and fully closed.
So now instead of “just” installing a home automation system, we have also a full monitoring system of property (for customer staff and for us) and extremely reliable system (HA is only rebooted once a year when we do planned updates).
We also specialise in opening closed systems so customer can get control back on its system. For example, some systems based on CAN bus with proprietary AMX hardware and control softwares: Use case: Freeing a fully locked home-automation system | Domedia
As installer you Must set criteria of what will be used and recommended to customer.
Basically do not install products that require vendor for setup or cloud connectivity.
Media player like Roku / Apple TV would like be only exception since you cannot block them from internet. In this case just pray they don’t lock down , hope someone unlocks if they lock, have hacker on staff or plan for this and expect hardware replacement.
