Home Assistant Cloud Is Now Home Assistant Link: Why the Name Matters
Home Assistant is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link.
Founder Paulus Schoutsen said: "Big tech ruined the cloud, so we're out" The Verge.
Link offers the same features as the old Cloud service, with back-end work to make it faster and more reliable.
Home Assistant itself still runs on a small computer in your home and controls lights, locks and other devices without needing the internet for the basic job.
For $6.50 per month, Link adds remote access from outside the home, plus connections to Alexa and Google voice control, speech-to-text — software that turns spoken words into text commands — and encrypted backups, which are locked copies of your setup stored safely elsewhere.
Nabu Casa, Home Assistant's commercial partner, runs the service. All Link traffic is encrypted, which means it is scrambled in transit so others cannot read it. Sixty percent of profit from Link goes to the Open Home Foundation, the non-profit that runs Home Assistant.
Home Assistant also plans to release a new, easier-to-use hub next year.
The broader context here is that the name is catching up with how the system already works. Cloud has come to mean accounts, processing and stored data that live on someone else's servers. Link describes a secure connection back to a system that already runs by itself at home. Local routines stay local. Remote access, voice connections, speech-to-text and backups are optional add-ons, not requirements.
Looking at what this means for adoption, the monthly fee was rarely the main hurdle. The harder question was trust, meaning which parts run at home and which parts send data outside. A home controller with one encrypted outside path is easier to understand than a split setup where you have to track what runs where. Keeping Alexa and Google support as paid bridges lets households that already use those speakers keep them, without making everyday automations depend on them. The same applies to speech-to-text, which adds another way to give commands, and encrypted backups, which protect against losing the home computer or its storage.
In my view, the funding setup helps explain why no new features were needed for the rename. Nabu Casa operates the service, and the Open Home Foundation receives the majority of the profit. The product is continuity. The business covers maintenance, the servers that relay remote connections, and regular funding for the foundation, rather than charging by usage or adding tiers.
In my experience watching my two kids grow up with wave after wave of gadgets, expectations have flipped. They assume lights, media and locks should keep working when broadband goes down. That expectation favors systems that treat the home as the main record and the internet connection as a convenience. If the planned hub lowers setup work, that approach could spread beyond enthusiasts who are comfortable with manual updates and fixing connection issues.
In my view, if Link sets up remote sessions faster and fails less often on voice and backup tasks, the rename will look like a correction rather than marketing. The controller stays at home. What changes is that the paid service describes its job more clearly, which is to reach that controller securely when you are away and to help pay for its upkeep.
