Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant's paid service. The reason is stated plainly: Big Tech has given the cloud a bad name, and some people thought Home Assistant runs in the cloud. The change becomes official in the 2026.12 release in December.
- The service itself does not change: still optional, the home works without it, data is encrypted and only you hold the key.
- The majority of subscription profits go to the Open Home Foundation, the foundation behind Home Assistant.
- Until December, Nabu Casa is collecting the community's views on the new name. The post gives no price.
The founder of Home Assistant walks on stage and says "don't buy products that require the cloud to work". In the next sentence he has to explain why their own service is called Home Assistant Cloud. Carl Albertsson of Nabu Casa describes it exactly like that in his post, as unnecessary friction. Today they remove it with a name that no longer gets in the way of what they say.
The word "cloud" was the best piece of marketing this industry ever produced. Before it, there was someone else's server. After it, someone else's machine with your data inside started to sound like the sky, and for years nobody asked whose machine it was.
Now it runs the other way. A company with a service in the cloud is running from the word, because its customers already read it as "they will raise the price, it will go down on a Sunday and they will sell my data". That is a measurement of language, taken by people who live off subscriptions and hear what they are told.
What matters for us is elsewhere. With a smart home the question is always the same: does it work when the internet goes down, or when the company does. Home Assistant has answered yes from day one, and the rename only underlines it. Link is an extra: access from outside, Alexa and Google Home without the digging, online speech recognition, an online backup. Take it away and the lights still come on.
The name becomes official in December. Until then they are asking you what the service you pay for should be called, and they promise to read the answers. A rare sentence in this industry, which is why we are running it.