This year I've been trying to delete subscriptions that I don't really need. I've been able to replace many of my paid subscriptions with free alternatives that can do the same job. However, I have kept my Home Assistant Cloud subscription, and for many good reasons.
Remote access to Home Assistant
One of the most useful features Home Assistant Cloud Subscription is that it allows you to safely get remote access to your smart home. This is easy to do with smart home ecosystems like Alexa and Google Home, but with the default Home Assistant setup, you can't monitor or control your smart home devices when you're away from home.
This is by design. Home Assistant is designed to work without having to send all your data to the cloud. This allows you to maintain the privacy of your data, ensuring that information about your smart home does not leave your local network. This also means that your smart home will continue to work even if the Internet goes down.
There are ways to set up secure access to the Home Assistant server from outside your home. You can use options like Tailscaleor configure Cloudflare tunnel. These options are either free or have minimal associated costs. However, Home Assistant Cloud is almost certainly the simplest solution.
All you need to do is enable “Remote Access” in the Home Assistant Cloud settings and set the “External URL” in the companion app to “Home Assistant Cloud.” You can then access Home Assistant from anywhere, with all data fully encrypted between your device and the Home Assistant server.
Cloud backups
Another major benefit of Home Assistant Cloud is that it gives you an easy way to store Home Assistant backups securely in the cloud. If you've ever had a hardware failure and lost your entire Home Assistant setup, you'll know about it. how important is it to have backups?.
With Home Assistant Cloud, you can back up your Home Assistant instance to the cloud as long as the total backup size is 5 GB or less. You can only store one backup in the cloud; each new backup will overwrite the previous one.
It's still worth making a few backups; That Backup method 3-2-1 recommends making three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy stored off-site. Home Assistant Cloud gives you an easy way to keep a backup while away from the office, though there are other methods.
Easy integration with Alexa and Google Home.
Most people turn to Home Assistant to move away from smart home systems like Alexa and Google Home which do not have the best reputation for privacy. However, if you have an Alexa or Google smart speaker, you can still use them to control your smart home.
Home Assistant Cloud makes it easy to connect Google Home and Amazon Alexa to Home Assistant. You can then connect your Home Assistant devices to your smart home ecosystem and control them with your voice using your existing smart speakers. You can say “Alexa, turn on the living room lamp” just like you would with a light bulb added through the Alexa app.
Cloud STT and TTS
If you're tired of everything you say to your smart speakers being sent to Google or Amazon, you can use Own voice assistant Home Assistantcalled “Assistant”. Assist's goal is to be a fully autonomous voice assistant where everything is processed locally rather than on third-party servers, keeping your data private. There are several components of the Assist pipeline, two of which are speech-to-text (STT), which converts your spoken request into text, and text-to-speech (TTS), which turns the generated written response into a spoken one.
This it is possible to run these parts of the pipeline locallybut with Home Assistant Cloud, you get secure access to STT and TTS Nabu Casa cloud services. They can often be faster and more accurate than a locally hosted service, making your experience with Assist less frustrating.
You support the development of Home Assistant
All of the above features can be reproduced to some extent in other ways that do not necessarily require a subscription. I already use a Cloudflare tunnel with other standalone services to access them remotely, so it would be pretty easy to replicate this for Home Assistant, for example. However, there is another reason why I'm glad to pay for the subscription.
The subscription fee is only $6.50 per month in the US or $65 for an annual subscription. For little more than the price of a cup of coffee per month, I get access to all the features Home Assistant Cloud offers. More importantly, however, the money from the Home Assistant Cloud subscription goes towards Home Assistant development support. Not only am I getting some really useful features, but I'm also making a small contribution to the continued development of software that has given me hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
Apart from the features listed above, Home Assistant Cloud includes other features such as support for triggering automations via webhooks and improved remote camera streaming using WebRTC. Even though I canceled other subscriptions this year, the combination of low cost, great features and the fact that it supports Home Assistant development means Home Assistant Cloud one of the few subscriptions that I won't refuse in the near future.
