Localized compute will be the new buzz word after Ai.
Well, at least it should be...
Your smart home is not yours.
Amazon hired thousands of contractors to listen to Echo recordings from people's living rooms. Bloomberg broke the story. Amazon never asked.
Ring handed doorbell footage to police 11 times in a single year without a warrant and without telling the owner.
In March 2025, Amazon killed local voice processing on Echo. Every word you say to Alexa now goes to Amazon's cloud. By default. Forever.
Your Samsung TV watches what you watch. Your Roomba maps every room. Your thermostat knows when you leave home.
And now they want you to pay for it.
Alexa : $19.99/month.
Ring Protect Plus: $20/month.
Nest Aware Plus: $20/month, up 33% in 2025.
You pay them to spy on you. Monthly. Forever.
In 2022, Insteon shut down without warning. Lights, switches, thermostats, all bricked overnight. Ten years of hardware, dead.
There is one app that controls every smart device on the planet. Locally. On your hardware. Without a single byte sent to Amazon, Google, or Ring.
It is called Home Assistant. 86,200 stars on GitHub.
2,000 built-in integrations. Lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, vacuums, blinds, EV chargers, solar inverters, doorbells, sprinklers. If a smart device exists, Home Assistant probably controls it.
Here's what it does:
→ Works with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, SmartThings, Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Z-Wave.
→ Voice control with your own local assistant. Wake word detection on your own hardware. Nothing sent to any cloud.
→ Build automations in 30 seconds. "When I leave home, lock the doors and turn off the lights."
→ Real-time energy dashboard. Spot the vampire devices.
→ Local AI cameras. Detect people, cars, animals. Footage stays on your drive.
→ Custom dashboards on any phone, tablet, or wall display.
Here's the wildest part:
When AWS goes down, Alexa stops working. When Google has an outage, Nest cameras go dark. When Ring servers throttle, your doorbell freezes.
Home Assistant runs on your hardware. The internet can be down. Your house still listens. Your lights still respond. Your locks still work.
The day Insteon shut down, Home Assistant users kept their lights on.
Owned by the Open Home Foundation. A Swiss non-profit. It cannot be sold. It cannot go subscription. It cannot paywall a feature. Ever.
Alexa Ring Nest: $720/year in subscriptions.
Home Assistant: $0. Forever. Every integration. Every automation. Every device.
Runs on a $50 Raspberry Pi. Runs on an old laptop. Runs in Docker on your NAS. The Home Assistant Green box is $99 once and never charges again.
86,200 stars. 37,300 forks. 425 contributors. Apache-2.0 license. Active since 2013.
Your home. Your data. Your rules.
100% Open Source.
(Link in the comments)