Nabu Casa renames Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, shedding the 'cloud' label

Nabu Casa drops the cloud label

Nabu Casa, the company that builds Home Assistant hardware and runs the platform's paid subscription, is renaming that service: Home Assistant Cloud will become Home Assistant Link. The change is due to become official with the December 2026.12 release. The announcement came in an October 2 blog post by Carl, the company's Vice President of Commercial, and it quickly reached the front page of Hacker News.

According to the post, the motivation is blunt: price increases, outages and the treatment of user data as a commodity have given the word "cloud" a bad reputation, and the old name never described the service accurately in the first place.

A name that clashed with the message

Nabu Casa cites two long-running problems with the branding. The first was friction in its own messaging: Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and President of the Open Home Foundation, has told audiences not to buy products that require the cloud to function, then had to explain moments later why Home Assistant Cloud was different despite its name.

The second was genuine user confusion. Some newcomers assumed the service offered a way to run Home Assistant itself in the cloud. The post stresses this has never been the case — Home Assistant is designed to run locally, in your home, and the subscription only adds optional online conveniences.

The company draws a direct comparison. Big Tech cloud services, in its framing, gate most features behind a connection, lock users into closed ecosystems, monetize their data for advertising, AI training and resale, and direct profits to investors first. Link, by contrast, is optional — the smart home keeps working without it, including after unsubscribing — involves no lock-in, keeps data encrypted so that only the subscriber holds the key, and sends the majority of subscription profits to the Open Home Foundation.

What the subscription funds

Nabu Casa was founded in 2018 to make Home Assistant development sustainable after years of building the platform in spare time, a pace the post links to burnout. Rather than soliciting donations, the company created an optional paid service; most of its profits now fund the Open Home Foundation, which pays salaried staff and supports volunteers.

Subscribers get remote access to their local install, simplified connections to Alexa and Google Home, online speech-to-text that Nabu Casa says is faster and more reliable than self-hosted alternatives and covers more languages, encrypted online backups, and access to human support staff. Recent work includes a redesigned account page, a speech-to-text experiment in Labs, a settings page with a setup wizard, and a backend migration to bare-metal servers that route each user to the nearest location for more responsive remote access.

Feedback invited before the switch

Although Link is a Nabu Casa product, the company is treating the rename as a community decision and has asked for feedback well before December, when the change becomes official in the 2026.12 release.

Why it matters

The rename is a pointed statement about how far the term "cloud" has fallen as a selling point. When a company strips the word from a service that is, technically, delivered online, it signals how strongly users now associate cloud with lock-in, surprise price hikes and surveillance. It also draws a clearer line between cloud dependency — devices that stop working when a vendor ends support, which the post blames for wasted hardware and the smart home's poor reputation — and optional online services layered on top of a system the user controls. For open-source sustainability, Nabu Casa's model remains a rare template: a commercial service whose stated purpose is funding a nonprofit, with the underlying product fully functional whether or not anyone pays.