Home Assistant drops 'Cloud' from its paid service, renaming it Home Assistant Link

What actually changed

Home Assistant is retiring the word "cloud" from its paid subscription. According to The Verge, founder Paulus Schoutsen announced that Home Assistant Cloud is being renamed Home Assistant Link, and he was blunt about the reasoning: "We hate clouds," he told the publication, adding, "Big tech ruined the cloud, so we're out." The Verge interviewed Schoutsen at the Z-Wave Summit in Boca Raton, Florida, ahead of the announcement.

In practical terms, almost nothing changes for subscribers. The Verge reports that the service keeps its features, apart from back-end work on speed and reliability. The new name does solve a real point of confusion, though: some new users assumed the old branding meant Home Assistant itself ran remotely. In fact, the platform runs on hardware inside your home and controls devices locally. The trade-off of that local-first design is that once you leave your home network, you cannot reach your setup — which is the main gap the subscription fills.

At $6.50 per month, Link provides remote access from anywhere plus optional internet-dependent features such as Alexa and Google voice integrations, speech-to-text, and encrypted backups. As with the old service, the subscription has never been required, and everything it offers can be reproduced with alternative methods.

A cloud service that claims no access to your data

Link is operated by Nabu Casa, Home Assistant's commercial partner, and according to Schoutsen it differs from typical cloud offerings in one key respect: the company has no visibility into user data, and all traffic is encrypted. "You don't have to trust me not to misuse your data because I just don't have your data," he told The Verge. The subscription also serves as the platform's funding mechanism, with 60 percent of profits going to the Open Home Foundation, the non-profit that oversees Home Assistant.

The rename also resolves an awkward bit of branding. Schoutsen and his team have spent years campaigning against proprietary cloud ecosystems and advising people not to buy cloud-dependent products, all while selling a service with "cloud" in its name.

The case against cloud dependence

Schoutsen's complaint is not that the cloud is useless — he concedes that speech-to-text, backups, and AI generally work better online. The problem, as he frames it, is hardware that stops functioning when a manufacturer pulls the plug. The Verge notes that he pointed to Nest discontinuing cloud support for thermostats in Europe, smart TVs quietly shipping user data off-device, and Weber shutting down the June Oven's servers, which he says leaves owners with a very expensive appliance that no longer works as intended.

His asks for manufacturers are specific: ship local control by default, build on open standards such as Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, and ESPHome, never lock basic functionality behind a server, and let users keep control of their own data. He also told The Verge he would like to see a "nutrition label" on packaging indicating whether a product depends on the cloud, and said a database of cloud-independent products is being built.

The push to go mainstream

The branding change is part of a broader effort to make Home Assistant approachable beyond its enthusiast base. The platform is installed in an estimated 2.7 million homes — a meaningful number, but far behind Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and likely Apple Home. Complexity remains the biggest obstacle, and Schoutsen's stated goal is to "lower the floor without lowering the ceiling."

Concrete plans include simpler dashboards, more intuitive setup, generative AI to absorb some of the difficulty, and a new, easier-to-configure successor to the Home Assistant Green hub next year. The HACS community store, where users find community-built integrations, is being integrated into the platform. Nabu Casa is also working on a "No Device Left Behind" hardware line designed to pull older equipment — receivers, air conditioners, solar inverters, TVs — into the platform via serial, IR, and Modbus.

Schoutsen sees AI agents as a potential turning point, arguing that agents could eventually configure the platform for users, while Home Assistant's local architecture lets people decide which agent to trust, including one that runs entirely at home.

Why it matters

A major open-source platform publicly treating "cloud" as damaged goods is a notable marker of how the term's reputation has shifted. For Home Assistant, the rename aligns its commercial product with the privacy and local-control principles it has long preached, while keeping a subscription model that funds development through a non-profit foundation. The bigger test is whether simplification and AI assistance can carry a famously powerful but demanding platform into the mainstream.