Home Assistant is throwing a tantrum about the cloud, and it’s doing it by changing the name of its own cloud service. The open-source smart home platform announced Wednesday that it is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, and founder Paulus Schoutsen is not shy about why. “We are renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, because we hate clouds,” he told The Verge in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Big tech ruined the cloud, so we’re out.”
This change is largely symbolic, since the features remain unchanged except for some back-end improvements to speed and reliability. Home Assistant Link continues to provide a convenient way to access your Home Assistant instance from anywhere, along with the choice to enable other internet-dependent features such as integration with Alexa and Google voice control, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and encrypted backups, all for $6.50 a month or $65 a year.
Why the Name Change?
Some new users worried that Home Assistant ran in the cloud, which is why the name has changed. In fact, Home Assistant operates on local hardware and governs your smart home locally; once you step outside your home network, you can no longer command anything. The change aims to make that arrangement more transparent.
For years, Schoutsen and his team have fought against proprietary cloud ecosystems, which he thinks damage the smart home, and urged people to avoid cloud-dependent products. This created a strange situation: they were warning everyone about the cloud while their own service carried its name right there in it.
The irony is that Home Assistant Cloud was never mandatory. You could always replicate everything it provided with other methods, and the same remains true for Link. Unlike some cloud services, Link is also different because it has no access to your data. Link is run by Nabu Casa, Home Assistant’s commercial partner, and all Link traffic is encrypted. “We can’t see it, and we don’t want to,” Schoutsen says. “You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I just don’t have your data.”
What Big Tech Ruined
The objection Schoutsen raises against the cloud is not a theoretical one. Instead, he cites specific recent cases of firms severing remote access to their machines.
- Nest shutting off the cloud for its early thermostats
- Smart TVs sending your data to the cloud without you knowing
- Weber sunsetting the June Oven’s servers
“Now you have a dumb oven that cost $1,500,” he says. “It’s crazy.” People get so used to connected devices that they get disappointed when they stop working.
Schoutsen admits that the cloud has its merits. Speech-to-text, backups, and AI perform better when connected to the internet. His concern, however, lies with products that fail to function at all without an internet connection. He wants manufacturers to pledge to provide local control as standard, using open standards (Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome), never tying fundamental features to a cloud service, and letting users manage their own data.
“I’d love to see a nutrition label on boxes showing if a product is cloud-dependent or not,” he says, adding that they’re building a database to help consumers find products that aren’t fully reliant on the cloud.
The Data Problem
The contradiction at the heart of this is that Link operates as a cloud service, and Schoutsen acknowledges that fact without attempting to conceal it. What he is doing instead is using the service’s revenue to support the platform, with 60 percent of the profit being directed to the non-profit Open Home Foundation, which manages Home Assistant.
The idea is that you pay a monthly charge to Nabu Casa for a connection to your own Home Assistant setup, with the company saying it cannot view your information because it stays locked through encryption. That is what is being promised. Whether the promise actually holds up when put into practice is another matter entirely.
Schoutsen makes his position clear: the company cannot see what is being exchanged between your device and Home Assistant. He puts it this way: “You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I just don’t have your data,”.
The Complexity Barrier
There is still a great deal of ground for Home Assistant to cover before it reaches the general public. Schoutsen estimates that Home Assistant is installed in approximately 2.7 million homes, yet that number represents only a small share of the reach enjoyed by Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Apple Home. Convincing everyday users to adopt it will require significant effort.
The biggest barrier to entry is complexity. Home Assistant does a lot, meaning you have a lot of choice, which can be overwhelming. “If you want to try something with Home Assistant, the answer is never no,” says Schoutsen. “We want everything to be possible, which means that the UX is more complicated, and that scares people.”
In comparison, “You open Apple Home, and there’s like nothing you can do,” he says.
Over the last few years, the team has been working to remove those barriers without taking away functionality. “We’re looking to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling,” he says. There are plans to launch a successor to the Home Assistant Green hub that will be easier to set up. “We want to make it more like onboarding a Philips Hue hub,” says Schoutsen.
The team is focused on making the user experience simpler, and they plan to add the HACS community store — the place where users find and install integrations built by the community — into Home Assistant next month. Once it’s in place, finding and setting up integrations should be a smoother process.
What Comes Next
The team is also planning a new hub for next year. “We’re growing up,” Schoutsen says.
| Feature | Home Assistant Cloud | Home Assistant Link |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Cloud | Link |
| Pricing | $6.50/month, $65/year | $6.50/month, $65/year |
| Features | Remote access, voice control, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, backups | Same |
| Data access | Not specified | Nabu Casa has no access |
The Verge’s Take
The rebranding is a marketing maneuver disguised as a political stand. It is also a practical decision: the group wishes to distance itself from a term that has become poisonous in the smart home field. The irony is that Home Assistant continues to charge users for a service that relies on distant infrastructure.
There’s no deception here from the company. Schoutsen makes it plain that Nabu Casa can’t access your data, and the system keeps information protected throughout. The issue is that the label promises one thing while the revenue plan points somewhere else.
A serious mission drives Home Assistant, yet renaming its cloud service to “Link” because “big tech ruined the cloud” comes across as a jest rather than a declaration of purpose. That service still demands payment and depends on distant servers, and no label can alter that fact.
The genuine accomplishments here are more noteworthy than any claims made about them. Simplifying the complexity barrier is a real issue worth addressing, and putting HACS into the main interface will indeed make it simpler to find integrations. The new hub is on its way, and the growth narrative holds up: 2.7 million installations is a substantial figure for an open-source project.
The cloud renaming is a stunt. It signals to the anti-cloud crowd that Home Assistant shares their values while still collecting a subscription fee from them. The contradiction is built into the design: a cloud-free ethos that depends on a cloud service to keep going.
Schoutsen is not wrong about the failures of cloud-dependent products. Nest’s early thermostats, smart TVs, and Weber’s June Oven are all examples of remote infrastructure failing. But Home Assistant’s own solution — a paid subscription to a remote service — is not a clean break from that pattern. It is a different kind of dependency, one that is more transparent about what it is doing.
Whether the signal lands is an open question. The anti-cloud message from Home Assistant will probably resonate with consumers who are becoming more worried about who gets to see their data. The platform remains far from reaching a mass audience, though.
It remains uncertain whether the new name will aid or hinder the journey ahead. Schoutsen has stated his view plainly. The outcome now rests upon how well he carries it out.
Source material: “Home Assistant says ‘Big tech ruined the cloud, so we’re out’,” The Verge.
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