Last Friday Nabu Casa announced that Home Assistant Cloud is being renamed Home Assistant Link. My first reaction was an eye-roll: a rebrand, how exciting. My second reaction, after reading the announcement post, was more interesting. The rename is really an argument about words, and I think it is a fair one.
Why the name never fit
According to the post, the old name caused real confusion. Some people assumed “Home Assistant Cloud” meant Home Assistant running in somebody else’s data center, when it has always been software that runs in your own house. Nabu Casa also admits the label sat awkwardly next to the project’s own advice to avoid cloud-dependent devices. I have felt that tension myself. I run Home Assistant OS bare-metal on a used HP EliteDesk, I tell people to keep things local, and the project’s own optional subscription carried the word I try to avoid.
I have explained the difference to friends more than once. “No, it is not in the cloud, it is just a tunnel and some extras.” A name that needs a footnote is a bad name. Link says what the thing does: it links a local installation to a handful of online features.
What Link actually is
The list is short and unchanged: remote access without port forwarding or VPN setup, the Alexa and Google Home integrations, online speech-to-text, private backup storage, human support, and a new account management interface with a setup wizard. The announcement is explicit that your home keeps working locally without it, that you can cancel at any time and keep everything, and that the service funds a nonprofit rather than shareholders. The post sets this out in a comparison table against Big Tech clouds: optional versus required, no lock-in versus walled garden. It is marketing, yes, but every row is checkable. You can unplug Link tomorrow and nothing in your house stops.
The official switch is planned for the 2026.12 release in December, and the team says it wants community feedback before making it final. No new pricing was mentioned in the post, so I will not guess at any.
Where I land, as someone who does not subscribe
I should be upfront: I do not use the subscription. My remote access is my own setup, and my backups go to storage I control. That is a choice I made because I enjoy owning the plumbing, not a claim that everyone should. For a lot of households, paying a small amount for remote access that just works, with money going back into the project, is a good deal. Most of the people I would like to see running Home Assistant do not want to maintain a reverse proxy. If Link is how they stay local-first for everything else, that is a win for the philosophy, not a compromise of it.
What I care about is the test the post itself implies: does the thing degrade gracefully? When Link is off, the lights, the automations, the Zigbee network and the dashboards should not notice. That was true of Cloud, and I expect it to be true of Link. Until the pricing and the transition details are published, the rename tells me nothing new about that. It only tells me how the team wants to be understood.
What I will watch before December
Three things. First, whether the new account management and setup wizard make it easier to see exactly what Link is doing for you and to turn individual pieces off. Second, whether existing subscribers get a clear explanation of what changes, because the announcement does not cover transition specifics. Third, whether the word “optional” keeps showing up in the documentation as loudly as it does in the announcement. Naming is the cheap part of trust. The expensive part is the boring promise that your house keeps working when the subscription ends.
If you do use Cloud today, I would read the original post and leave feedback while it is still being asked for. If you do not, this is a good moment to look at which parts of your remote access you would be happy to hand over, and which you would rather keep on your own hardware. I will keep my own tunnel for now, but I no longer roll my eyes when someone tells me they have Link.
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