Health, home and travel decision
Home Assistant Cloud
A capable developer can build a narrow self-hosted replacement covering remote access and backups, but reproducing the full managed product (voice assistant integrations, bundled privacy-preserving speech, account/subscription polish and ongoing support) is non-trivial and benefits from the vendor's brand and position.
Visit website↗$6.5/mo
$78/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$15/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Home Assistant Cloud alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Home Assistant Cloud publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
- NabuCasa/hass-nabucasa★215 GitHub starsGPL-3.0Issues related to the cloud integration in Nabu Casa↗
- NabuCasa/silabs-firmware-builder★206 GitHub starsApache-2.0Silicon Labs firmware builder↗
- NabuCasa/universal-silabs-flasher★173 GitHub starsGPL-3.0Flashes Silicon Labs radios running EmberZNet or CPC multi-pan firmware↗
- NabuCasa/snitun★119 GitHub starsGPL-3.0End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer↗
What a replacement has to do
- Provide secure remote access to a Home Assistant instance, perform encrypted automated backups and restores, relay webhooks and camera/WebRTC streams, and integrate with voice assistants / TTS/STT via external APIs.
What it still won’t have
- Official managed account/subscription and one-click trial experience
- Tight official integration with Home Assistant team and hardware
- Ongoing vendor support and coordinated development funding for Home Assistant
- The bundled privacy-preserving speech pipeline as implemented by Nabu Casa
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Made by the team driving the development of Home Assistant.
- Brand trust
Through the sale of official Home Assistant hardware and Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions, Nabu Casa funds the foundation's work.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Home Assistant Cloud replacement using FastAPI (Python) + PostgreSQL + Redis + AWS S3 (or similar) and Docker: 1) Implement a secure reverse-tunnel gateway (TLS mutual auth) that Home Assistant instances initiate to register and tunnel HTTP/WebRTC traffic; 2) Build an authenticated account service (Stripe subscription for one user) with MFA, user tokens, and an admin UI; 3) Scheduled encrypted snapshot exporter that pulls HA backups to S3 and supports restore-on-first-boot; 4) A webhook relay and camera stream forwarding component; 5) Integration adapters to proxy Google Assistant/Alexa intents and a pluggable TTS/STT using external APIs. Out of scope: training ML models, building a commercial-scale multi-tenant infra, or implementing official Home Assistant hardware support. Include error handling, request/auth logging, rate limiting, basic end-to-end tests for each component, and Docker-based deployment manifests.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNabu Casa - Home
- official pricingNabu Casa Pricing
- official docsNabu Casa Support - Home Assistant Cloud
- open sourcehome-assistant/core
- open sourceIceWhaleTech/CasaOS
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
