I understand that but still the burden shouldn’t fall on the members of this forum to give out FREE customer support while the business owners make the profits.
If you can’t provide your own customer support then don’t sell the product.
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As we mentioned in one of the replies above, we plan on making another topic on this site for any configuration questions related to what the Hassbox comes with from the start, and only if the admins are okay with that. On this topic (if we are allowed to make it) we will answer as many questions as possible. The newcomers from the traditional way of getting HA, might also find some value on this topic.
We very much understand why you would not want to help on this one topic. But on every other topic, that might be created by a person who bought HassBox, we don’t see what the problem is. Before you got a thank you out of helping and helped making the community better. Now you still get a thank you, you still help making the community better, and you play a small part in getting more money to the developers of the software I assume you love, and someone else (us) makes a small profit.
From HassBox, HA will get more new members, which equals more people buying Home Assistant Cloud and at the same time, we would also like to donate/pay/make a partnership with Home Assistant, but we need to get in contact with the right people to make this possible and also needs to see if anyone even wants to buy the HassBox.
The way we see it is that the Home Assistant software is getting more and more user friendly and probably is the best Smart Home platform around, but the way to get started on Home Assistant, is lacking a bit compared to other IoT platforms, since the installation process and research time is way higher than other platforms.
I understand the frustration, but you are in a way doing the exact same now every time you help someone in this community. Nabu Casa (Home Assistant Cloud) is a company that earns money, and I assume they make or want to make a profit. Don’t get me wrong, these are the developers, and they are more important than we will ever be, but we want to support these guys.
In general, most great products comes from companies trying to make profit 
Ok, if that’s the way this works I’m announcing right now that I am starting my own business.
My business model is that I will sell you a preconfigured Hassio install consisting of a Raspberry Pi, SD card, case, power supply, and your choice of z stick or zigbee stick for the special one time offer of $200 dollars. And, not only that I will provide lifetime support for the product at the following web address: https://community.home-assistant.io/.
Our eager support staff will be standing by 24 hours a day/7 days per week to answer any questions you may have regarding the product. The lifetime support package is offered for the low price of $29.99 per month and includes periodic free software updates.
Oder now! I will promise right here and now that as soon as you place your order that I will ship your order in 3-4 days. But that promise only takes effect four weeks from the time I receive the order since I don’t actually have the product to ship yet. But why would that stop me from advertising the 3 days shipping time? It’s not like I have control over what I’m writing here and could easily have been more honest about the true shipping times. Nah…
** in case anyone is wondering this is complete satire intended to make a point…
Nope…
And when did they start providing the Nabu Casa Cloud service for HA users? it wasn’t that long ago.
When did HA start being produced and distributed (for free)? I think I heard something for like 5 years or so. Let me put a point on this…They provided a free system to users for years, including providing this web forum to provide help for new users for free for over 4 years before they started offering a voluntary & completely optional fee for users who want an added convenience. And they are using that money to put back into development on a still 100% free system that you are now wanting to immediately start selling and making money on by getting all of us to jump on the bandwagon of free customer service for your customers.
If I was balloob I’d be pissed if I saw that.
You can try to sell me on this whole venture if you want but I’m not falling for it.
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Didn’t home assistant have another company try the same thing and it blew up on the home assistant devs. I think this idea is a great but should not be done by anyone other then home assistant (naba casa).
That would be the one.
To the OP: Clearly, you’ve ticked a few people off. You need to use your words more carefully.
You’re not selling software. You’re selling pre-configured hardware with some free software pre-installed. Just like lots of companies do with computers that have Ubuntu on them. You offer NO support for the software and you need to be upfront about that. But you fully support the hardware in the same way that Raspberry Pi supports their hardware.
And, to members of this helpful community of users: A person who bought HASS.IO preinstalled on a Raspberry Pi is still a HASS.IO user. Yes, the OP made a little money on the deal. But, when a user buys their own, bare, Raspberry Pi and installs HASS.IO on it, Raspberry Pi made a little money on the deal. And so did the company they bought it from. These users just bought a different piece of hardware than you. And yes, in supporting HASS.IO for free in this forum, you may end up supporting this hardware a bit too, just like we end up supporting the Raspberry Pi hardware, and Synology NAS hardware, and Dell hardware, and ASUS hardware, and ZWave Stick hardware, and Phillips Hue hardware, and Tuya hardware (ugh!) and whatever other types of hardware people use Home Assistant on and with. This is no different, except they probably paid a little more than you did, and someone other than Amazon or AliExpress put a few extra bucks in their pocket.
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This is all good but before advertising this product (hardware) to the community shouldn’t you make sure you get the approval of Home Assistant/Naba Casa.
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Since the community forum was used to post this, and the forum hardware and website is owned by, I assume, Paulus, probably, yes, that would be the polite thing to do.
But, as Home Assistant gets more and more popular, there will be more and more of this sort of thing… which is both good and bad. Good, because that’s more people using Home Assistant, which means, probably, more contributors, bug fixers, supporters, documenters, etc. Bad, because that means more resources are required to serve these pages, to help these users, etc, etc.
Home Assistant is built on the backs of other people. Its software is version controlled by github. A company who makes money selling a preinstalled and fancied up version of “git”, which is free software. I don’t know exactly what runs this forum, but, it’s probably running on Apache or Nginx with Debian or Ubuntu underneath that, all free software. The Nabu Casa servers themselves, a for-pay service, probably run free software as well. The developers of Home Assistant likely use Atom or VSCode to write their software, both free. And Home Assistant is entirely written in Python, also free. On top of that, Home Assistant itself requires hundreds of other libraries, all free, to do what it does.
It’s one thing to launch a whole new product like COVI did, with Home Assistant embedded in it, and all their development efforts going toward their profits alone, and then slapping the “Home Assistant” name on it to gather support and making big claims about how much they contributed. It’s another thing entirely to sell a bunch of pieces of hardware hooked together ahead of time and include a copy of HASS.IO preinstalled. Both of these things are allowable because Home Assistant is FOSS. But one is quite a bit more “against the grain of the community” than the other.
That being said, I don’t think there is, yet, a huge market for a product like this. Home Assistant requires you to get your hands dirty. Sure, it’s becoming easier and easier with each release for the Average Joe to be able to get it to work. But it’s still not “SmartThings” easy. And even then, for SmartThings to really be as successful as it was (is?) it needed Groovy and lots of developers offering free (and paid) solutions and code plus a thriving support forum filled with users helping users to make it.
So even if someone buys a “hassbox”, because it’s got a pretty case (and, damn, that IS a pretty case), and they didn’t have to source the hardware, and they could just plug it in and stop fiddling with hardware… they are still going to be fiddling with software like the rest of us. And when Home Assistant eventually gets to the GUI Utopia they seek then, “hassbox” or not, the number of users will increase at a faster rate than they already are.
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It need to be made explicitly clear that HA is not responsible for anything and that support for the software is not part of the cost of the device. People will have an expectation as the have paid money for something they should be entitled to support or priority support regardless of who makes the software and then it becomes HA issue including any negativity of the product. Personally i can’t see this being helpful for HA in the long run and has the potential of another Kodi like problem.
I love your idea of HassBox, I hope people buy it!
Just asking, what is that software for the checkout stuff?
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To all the people saying it is not a good idea to sell home assistant as a product: it’s not like he is claiming he made the software, as long as it is listed has “has home assistant pre installed” or “powered by home assistant” app over the place, I think it is fine.
Also to OP if you know how maybe you should modify the code or whatever to give you control since people will little knowledge might buy it.
This I agree with
We all help people with nabu casa, and that is a commercial venture (albeit one that helps this project specifically).
We all help people with google nests, and many other commercial products that interact with home assistant. No doubt some companies make some money from the fact that some open source developer has supported their product, and HA users will favour buying the supported product over the unsupported one. EG I bought a Xiaomi vacuum because someone made an integration for it.
In addition open source licences do NOT prevent software being sold, or bundled with hardware.
As long as the Hassbox people are supplying stock home assistant, it will be no different to any other person coming here for support.
If they fork home assistant, or add a whole lot of other infrastructure to their install, then they are on their own as far as I am concerned.
I welcome them, after some initial cynicism.
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Just wondering, since you ship to multiple countries I assume you’ll have some method of specifying which version of the z-wave stick to order? There are three versions depending on what frequency is used in your country.
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It’s impossible to buy just the case?
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Plex solely uses forums for support.
There are other companies such which also rely on forums heavily for support such as Curve, Bulb energy, Starling Bank (when they had a forum) etc. In a lot of products/services these days Customer Support can take over a month to reply to you which is really frustrating!
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Pretty sure that’s just a render, can’t seem to find any pictures of the actual case. I’d assume if this is a real case they have used off the shelf components to construct it as it’d be a bit silly getting injection moulded parts before you know if you have a viable product.
Hi @DieKatzchen ,
You are right. At the moment, we have only tested the z-wave stick for EU but will of course make sure that it works in the customers country before shipping.