I am opening a new company soon for supply and installation of home automation system. I am planning to use Home assistant as the core software of the system but wondering wheter it is allowed legally to use an open source software for professional use or not bearing into mind that home assistant is made to be free for home owners .
Also Does home assistant requires any licensing ?
Note i will chrage owners for progarmming cost of home assistant while other expendures like installation of smart devices and cost of smart devices are not related to home assistant .
The license is Apache 2.0. Basically you can go commercial with the code as long as you include notice of the license itself and understand that there’s no liability on their part. You do not have copyleft obligations, but can and should of course contribute your code or parts of it back to the community.
The way I see it, the only thing that makes sense here is a subscription fee to keep the HA installation fresh and healthy, and a support service so the right devices are chosen and security issues are dealt with.
It’s a toughie but I believe in the business model. What did you end up doing? It might be good to get together and share insights, I doubt we will be competing anytime soon. If that happens… it’s very good news for us both anyway. XD
Is it possible to get in touch by email here?
Hi to all.
I live in Greece and am planning a similar idea. To use HA as a commercial product (perhaps together with the Home Assistant yellow board). Several scenarios may apply. I sell the service and pay for the hardware and setup myself, I sell everything and keep the service at a lower price, or I sell and set everything up with the customer so they have full support.
My concern besides the license part is how confident can I be with these updates almost every week.
I’m already using ESPHOME with hacked SONOFF modules and with my own M10COBE designs (Vasilis Vorrias / M10 · GitLab)
Now my concerns are the updates. It seems impossible (and dangerous) to serve 100 or more clients with such frequent (and potentially dangerous) updates and bug fixes.
Should I wait for things to settle?
Anyway, using it at home I found it extremely good and stable (I do all the updates) but using it as a professional tool? Can be done? Has anyone else done this?
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks
Then don’t update once everything is working (until you require
an update for some new functionality).
Just make sure HA doesn’t have internet access, and all will be swell
Another option is to disable the update sensors; updates will be available but not visible…
Or if you want to try to prepare enterprise level support :
host your own infra with your repo for linux or your images for container
program the server to use your own repo or images
get last versions every month (once a week is too frequent for production)
have a test environment to validate the new version
once validated, provide the new version on your repo or your image library
develop a mecanism for the clients to update automatically with the last version available on YOUR repo
That requires quite a lot of work, some solid infra/virtu/network/security skills + hosting your own infra. You don’t provide 24/7 infra since it’s only for updates, so you don’t need to invest too much on the redundancy.
NB : I started my business that way and +++ on the support and highavailabilty level (ticketing, monitoring, remote assistance through backcall VPN, backups/restore/send replacement…)
