The firm behind Home Assistant, the widely used open-source home automation software, has decided to remove the word “cloud” from its cloud offering altogether. The product is now being called Home Assistant Link.
Carl, the Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa, has made the announcement. He says the old name no longer fits. The firm wants to distance itself from the weight the word “cloud” now carries. That weight comes from years of Big Tech companies raising subscription prices, suffering outages, and harvesting data.
The Burnout Problem
Home Assistant started as a side project run by a few core developers working nights and weekends. That kind of schedule has ended plenty of open-source projects, so in 2018 Nabu Casa was founded to fund the work. The idea was simple: make Home Assistant easier for more people to use, starting with the problem of reaching your system when you’re not at home.
The subscription service was designed to be optional and to support the project’s sustainability. Today, most of the money raised funds the Open Home Foundation, which backs everyone contributing to Home Assistant — paid staff and volunteers alike. That change moved the project from a hobby into something capable of investing back into its community and staying around for the long term.
The Friction of the Name
The old name created unnecessary friction. Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and President of the Open Home Foundation, was often on stage saying “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work,” then in the next breath explaining how Home Assistant Cloud is different. The company even removed the word from its logo, which Carl admits might have gone too far.
More misunderstanding followed. Certain fresh arrivals believed Home Assistant Cloud was a means to operate Home Assistant in the cloud, a notion that has never held true. Nabu Casa holds that Home Assistant ought to remain running locally, within your own household.
What Link Actually Does
Link is very different from other cloud-powered smart home services. Subscriptions help sustain Home Assistant, but the company has been clear from the beginning that you do not need Link to use the platform. The comparison to Big Tech is straightforward: thermostats that can’t be scheduled and cameras that can’t detect motion, turning smart devices into paperweights when support drops.
Nabu Casa calls Big Tech’s treatment of data morally bankrupt, because the companies treat personal information as something to sell to advertisers, feed into AI training, and hand over to third parties for the highest price possible. With Home Assistant Link, by contrast, data stays encrypted at all times, and only the user holds the key. Neither Nabu Casa nor the Open Home Foundation wants access to that data, and both organizations work hard to ensure they never get the chance to see it.
What it means for technology to actually serve people is having your own data and a smart home that responds to you rather than answering to corporate shareholders.
The Extras You Get
Link makes Home Assistant easier to use, opening up the local and private smart home to more people. Connecting to Alexa and Google Home can be complex to set up yourself, but Link allows you to link them to Home Assistant without the hassle. If you don’t have the time or know-how, Link ensures it isn’t a barrier.
Some features perform better when they draw on Link’s connected services. Speech-to-text done over the internet generally works faster and handles more languages than self-hosted options, while being more dependable too. Link provides an online storage space for keeping a backup, which means your information stays recoverable even as it stays private. Should you run into trouble with any feature, there is also the option to reach real people for assistance.
Behind the Scenes
Nabu Casa is also working on new features. The new account page is easier to use, and there’s a speech-to-text Labs test and a new settings page with a setup wizard. The backend got a major update too, migrating to a new bare-metal setup that always tries to get you on the closest server. It’s fast, as Carl puts it.
The company gains the power to introduce fresh security measures and account management tools through these changes.
Why the Name Matters
The argument here is that actions carry more weight than product names do. Carl’s case rests on the idea that a subscription should be judged by its actual practices: privacy, transparency, and avoiding lock-in. At the same time, the service’s own move to rename itself shows it wants nothing to do with the word “cloud” anymore, which is why it changed Home Assistant’s development. The irony is that Nabu Casa built its own cloud service to avoid depending on Big Tech, and now it”s name to escape it entirely.
The company’s position is consistent: you don’t need Link, but it’s there if you want it. The extras are exactly that — extras. Unsubscribe and your smart home keeps working.
Nabu Casa is making clear that Home Assistant Link, which operates online, is distinct from other cloud-based smart home services. The company is signaling that its service is private, optional, and free from lock-in or walled gardens. The announcement serves as a reminder that the cloud is not a single thing.
| Feature | Link | Big Tech |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription required | Optional | Often mandatory |
| Data ownership | Only you have the key | Sold to advertisers |
| Lock-in | None | Common |
| Extras | Faster speech-to-text, backups | Varies |
The irony is that Nabu Casa built its own cloud service to avoid depending on Big Tech, and now it’s renaming that service to escape the word “cloud” entirely. The company’s position is consistent: you don’t need Link, but it’s there if you want it. The extras are exactly that — extras. Unsubscribe and your smart home keeps working.
The announcement is a reminder that the cloud is not a single thing. Home Assistant Link runs online, but it’s very different from other cloud-powered smart home services. Nabu Casa is betting that consumers can tell the difference — that they’ll see the word “cloud” and hear the baggage, and then read the fine print to find out what Link actually does.
The firm’s actions speak louder than its product names. It has run a subscription that’ has long spoken on privacy, transparency, and avoiding lock-in for users, even as it backs the growth of Home Assistant. Its title now reflects that mission.
Source material: “Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours,” home-assistant.io.
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