Nabu Casa renames Home Assistant Cloud to Link, saying Big Tech ruined the cloud
Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours
Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, arguing that Big Tech has tarnished the cloud with subscriptions, outages, and data harvesting. The company stresses that Link remains optional, private, and free from lock-in, with profits funding the Open Home Foundation. The change becomes official in the December 2026.12 release.
Big Tech has given the cloud a bad name, and while Link does run online, it is very different from other cloud-powered smart home services.
- benabus
I feel like Cloud means something now, and as part of the general lexicon, it's okay to use it for what it means. At this point, Cloud kind of means that it's a service hosted somewhere on the Internet, that you don't control directly, usually that you pay for. Sounds like they're still doing that.
Changing the name to distance yourself from AWS and Google Cloud is fine, but "Link" doesn't really tell you anything about where it's hosted or that you still have to pay for it. In fact, by announcing this change with the specific goal of distancing yourself from Big Tech it kind of implies that you're no longer a paid service that happens in some remote data center.
But whatevs. Words don't actually mean anything anymore anyway.
- voidnullvalue
Nabu Kasa keeps ignoring the elephant in the room of security and permissions. They have no native ability to set user groups and permissions. There is no serious RBAC. I guess it doesn't sell cloud subscriptions. I cant keep my children from affecting devices they shouldn't. I ended up replacing my automation with mqtt
- pkulak
Guys, you don't have to use it. That's the _entire_ point. Every comment in here is some version of "But it's still a cloud". Sure. But if the entire thing can be replaced with a Tailscale free account, or a Cloudflare tunnel, or a port forward at your router (in descending order of "should you do it"), is it really the same thing? Hence the name change.
- paimapi
I'll wait for someone to do a network call audit before I trust something like this
I've been working on a small project running mitmproxy on a lot of 'privacy-focused' baby-tracking apps and only one of the ones I've tested doesn't send back a bevy of analytics data (none of which they openly promise to anonymize)
some of the worst culprits had things like the Facebook SDK and Google Ads installed and sending data in spite of literally promising not to generate an Ad ID and three (Baby+, Nanit, and Pregnancy+) straight up had Microsoft Clarity sending data (ie basically screen recordings and full input logs)
- TwoNineA
(H)ome (A)ssistant (L)ink.
Might as well add 9000 at the end of it.