Nabu Casa Nabu CasaCompany behind Home Assistant. Offers Home Assistant Cloud (remote access + Alexa/Google integration) as a paid service – funds HA development is a commercial company behind Home Assistant that offers the Home Assistant Cloud Service. This enables the very simple connection of Home Assistant to voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. With an active account, the entities and devices that should be accessible for the voice assistant can be easily set via the user interface.
In addition, Nabu Casa offers the possibility of a secure external access to Home Assistant with a subscription, which is very practical especially with the Home Assistant app. For this service, Nabu Casa previously charged 5 US dollars per month, i.e. about 4.40 euros. Now the price has been raised to 6.50 US dollars, an increase of 30% after all. If you pay a year in advance, you save 2 months and thus come to 65.00 US dollars. All existing users with an active subscription will only have to pay the new prices in 3 months.
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The amount won’t kill anyone who operates a smart home, because the other costs for it probably weigh more heavily. In addition, you also support the further development of Home Assistant with this contribution.
However, the cloud function of Nabu Casa was extremely slow and unreliable in recent weeks, so there was a lot of criticism. Nabu Casa then announced that they were working on a new foundation for the cloud connection to Alexa, which should restore the old performance. This probably also happened faster than initially announced. Nevertheless, the timing for the price increase was very unfortunate, as it still fell within the period when the services were not working reliably.
Since we ourselves control many things in Home Assistant via Alexa, I already pulled the ripcord two weeks ago and connected Alexa manually, without Nabu Casa, to Amazon , which wasn’t as time-consuming as initially feared. Since I still have the Home Assistant Cloud subscription, I was now able to make a comparison. In fact, Nabu Casa is working again as I was used to. However, the direct connection without the Home Assistant Cloud is still significantly faster in direct comparison, because it doesn’t have to go through one or more (I don’t know Nabu Casa’s infrastructure) hops.
The external access, which now takes place via an NGINX reverse proxy directly via the fixed IP of my DSL provider, is also a bit snappier in operation. If you have concerns here, you can also secure the access with a free Cloudflare account.
For me, the manual solution has proven to be better and if you have the technical prerequisites and knowledge, you can undoubtedly consider it. If you want it simple and convenient, you continue to rely on Nabu Casa. If Nabu Casa’s infrastructure fails or is attacked, all connected Home Assistant systems for voice control and remote access will fail. Of course, there can also be problems with the manual connection, for example due to changes in the API APIApplication Programming Interface – defined interface through which programs communicate. Home Assistant offers a REST and a WebSocket API (e.g. for MCP) , etc., but at least you have that in your own hands. You can continue to support Home Assistant through the subscription - but you don’t have to use the services.
Related: Connect Home Assistant with Alexa faster, more reliably and for free
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