Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours
Nabu Casa is rebranding 'Home Assistant Cloud' to 'Home Assistant Link' to better align with its values of privacy and open-source sustainability. The company emphasizes that its commercial services are designed to fund the development of the Home Assistant platform without relying on data harvesting.
Why it matters
This reflects a growing trend in the smart home industry where companies are distancing themselves from the 'cloud' label to emphasize user privacy and local control.
From ever-increasing subscription prices to outages and data harvesting: we don’t like what the cloud has come to represent. So we’re redefining what an online service should be: private, optional, and free from lock-in or walled gardens.
That’s why today Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to more accurately describe what the service actually does , and to better reflect our values. Allow us to introduce:
I’m Carl, Vice President of Commercial at Nabu Casa. You probably know us as the folks making all that sleek, highly optimized Home Assistant hardware. Beyond hardware, we also manage and run Home Assistant Link, and as one of the Open Home Foundation’s commercial partners, we’re here to help fund all their amazing work. We feel pretty passionately about the word cloud, and we’d love to explain how the old name never fit, and why Link finally does.
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