A new name for an established service
Nabu Casa has renamed Home Assistant Cloud as Home Assistant Link, arguing that the word “cloud” no longer reflects either the service's role or the values of the Home Assistant project. The change applies to the subscription product that provides remote access and other online connections for installations built around the locally controlled smart-home platform.
The company says Link is meant to connect a user's Home Assistant system to outside services while leaving the core smart home under local control. Nabu Casa contrasts that model with online platforms built around mandatory accounts, data collection and closed ecosystems. The subscription remains optional rather than a requirement for running Home Assistant.
The product began in 2018 under the Cloud name. Nabu Casa says it was created both to simplify secure remote access and to provide a sustainable source of funding for Home Assistant development. That funding model was designed as an alternative to relying entirely on donations or unpaid work by open-source contributors. The company says most subscription profit supports work carried out through the Open Home Foundation.
Connection without replacing the local system
The Link name emphasizes that the online service acts as a bridge. Home Assistant itself can continue operating on hardware in the home, while the subscription handles selected connections that would otherwise require more configuration. That distinction has become central to the project's pitch as smart-home devices and services increasingly depend on vendor servers that can change terms, raise prices or shut down.
Nabu Casa's announcement presents privacy, choice and interoperability as the principles behind the rebrand. It says the service is intended to avoid lock-in and walled gardens, and that the change does not turn Home Assistant into a cloud-dependent platform. Those are the company's descriptions of its design and business model; the announcement does not provide an independent audit of its privacy or security practices.
The rebrand also reflects a broader problem with technology language. “Cloud” once served as a neutral shorthand for remotely hosted computing. For many consumers, it now also suggests recurring fees, outages, large-scale data collection and dependence on a provider. Nabu Casa is explicitly distancing its product from those associations rather than abandoning online infrastructure.
Existing subscribers are receiving a new label for the service they already use, not a replacement smart-home architecture. The central arrangement remains a locally run Home Assistant installation with optional paid connectivity layered on top. For the organization, the commercial service continues to perform two jobs: making remote connections easier for users and financing development of the open-source platform.
Whether Link becomes clearer than Cloud will depend on how consistently Nabu Casa explains which functions are local and which rely on its servers. The new name nevertheless gives the company a direct way to state its intended boundary: internet connectivity should extend a Home Assistant system, not become the system's owner.
