Home Assistant
Open source home automation
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
Home Assistant runs your smart home on your own hardware instead of somebody else's cloud. Lights, locks, cameras and sensors land in one app and one automation engine, across more than 1,400 integrations. Apache 2.0, free, no feature tiers.
Everything runs locally by default, which is the whole point. Home Assistant OS on a dedicated box handles its own updates and apps (the new name for add-ons). The Docker container leaves updates to you and can't run apps, so no out-of-the-box Thread or Z-Wave. Budget a weekend.
Hardware is the real bill: Green is $199 preinstalled, plus $49 for a ZBT-2 (Zigbee or Thread) or $69 for a ZWA-2 (Z-Wave). Home Assistant Cloud, $6.50/month or $65/year, adds remote access, offsite backups, Alexa and Google Home; it becomes Home Assistant Link in December. Solo and households: free plus a Green. Small offices: free. Larger teams: wrong tool.
The catch: integrations break when vendors move. 2026.10 removed SolarEdge Local and Melnor RainCloud after their makers killed the APIs. A critical March 2026 advisory also caught some apps exposing unauthenticated endpoints, even a full shell, to the local network until a Supervisor patch. Keep it updated.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
free self hosted paid cloudFree: All of the software: Core, Home Assistant OS, Supervisor, the apps system (formerly add-ons), more than 1,400 integrations, automations, dashboards and local voice. Apache 2.0, no paid tier inside the software, no gated features.
Self-hosted: Runs on hardware you supply. Official hardware at US MSRP (tax excluded): Home Assistant Green $199 with the OS preinstalled; Connect ZBT-2 $49 for Zigbee or Thread (it runs one or the other, never both at once); Connect ZWA-2 $69 for Z-Wave including Long Range; Voice Preview Edition $69 for a local voice speaker. Home Assistant Yellow is out of production but still gets software updates. A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 needs at least 2GB of RAM; the Pi 5 16GB lists at $305. Any spare PC, NAS or VM works. The Container install skips Home Assistant OS but loses apps, and with them out-of-the-box Thread and Z-Wave.
Paid: Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa, optional: $6.50/month or $65/year in USD, tax not included (annual is a year for the price of 10 months), with a 31-day free trial and no card required. It covers remote access, offsite backups, Alexa and Google Home voice control, cloud speech-to-text and text-to-speech, better media streaming, and support for those features. Nabu Casa is renaming it Home Assistant Link in the 2026.12 release, described as the same service with a new name. The majority of subscription profits fund the Open Home Foundation. Pay for it the day you want to reach your house from outside without running your own VPN or reverse proxy.
The software is free and ungated. Most households spend $199 on a Green plus $6.50/month or $65/year for Home Assistant Cloud (renamed Home Assistant Link in December) to reach the house remotely.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; budget $199 for a Green if you have no spare machine, and $65/year for Cloud remote access
- Small team
- free; one shared instance covers a household or small office
- Medium team
- free; not team software, and there is no per-seat product to buy
- Large team
- free, but the wrong tool; commercial buildings need purpose-built building management systems
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