Home Assistant Cloud pricing: do you need the Nabu Casa subscription?

Get a Home Assistant box running and the same question turns up within a week: there is a subscription, do you have to pay for it? No. Home Assistant is free and stays free. Whether you should pay anyway is a different question, and the answer has nothing to do with which features you get.

Three layers, and why they get muddled

Home Assistant is three separate things, and most writing about it treats them as one.

• The software. Home Assistant itself is free and open source, maintained by the non-profit Open Home Foundation.
• The hardware. Home Assistant Green, Yellow, the Connect adapters and Voice Preview Edition are one-off purchases sold under the Nabu Casa name.
• The subscription. Home Assistant Cloud is the paid service, provided by Nabu Casa.

The project's own documentation is blunt about it: Home Assistant works fully without the subscription. Cancel and nothing local changes. Your lights, sensors, scripts and automations keep running on your own network, because they always were.

What the subscription actually buys

One toggle, and these come with it:

• Remote access. Open your dashboard from anywhere, with no ports opened on your router.
• Voice assistants. The Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integrations.
• Cloud speech. Speech for Assist covering more than 50 languages, plus better text-to-speech voices.
• Off-site backup. Storage of your most recent backup, up to 5 GB.
• Webhooks. Publicly reachable endpoints, without exposing the instance.
• Camera streaming. Improved streaming over WebRTC.

Note what is not on that list: any feature of the software itself. Everything here is a service that lives outside your house, which is exactly why you cannot have it for free without running the outside part yourself.

What it costs in Australia

There is no Australian price. Australia sits in Nabu Casa's "International" band, so you are billed in US dollars and the amount that lands on your statement moves with the exchange rate. Most Australian cards add an international transaction fee on top, and Nabu Casa does not say how GST is handled, so treat the converted figures as a floor rather than a quote. The annual plan saves USD 13, effectively two months free.

There is a free 31-day trial. There is no lifetime option, no one-time fee and no student or concession rate. You can pay by card, Google Pay, Apple Pay or PayPal. The US dollar price has changed once in eight years: USD 5 at launch in 2018, USD 6.50 since February 2022. It is the exchange rate, not Nabu Casa, that makes the Australian cost move.

Doing it free, honestly

Home Assistant documents four ways to reach your home from outside: the Cloud subscription, a VPN such as Tailscale or ZeroTier One, a reverse proxy, or port forwarding to Home Assistant's own port, 8123 unless you installed since release 2026.8, with DuckDNS handling a changing IP address. Three of those cost nothing.

They are not equally easy, and the project does not pretend otherwise. Its documentation calls Home Assistant Cloud the easiest and safest of the four, and points out that it opens no ports. On port forwarding it is blunt: just putting a port up is not secure, and you should encrypt the traffic. The free route to that encryption is DuckDNS with the Let's Encrypt app (add-ons were renamed Apps in release 2026.2).

Two things bite harder in Australia. Many ISPs put customers behind CG-NAT, sharing one public IPv4 address between households, which breaks port forwarding outright, and a dedicated IP address usually costs extra. A VPN sidesteps that, but it needs client software on every phone that will ever need remote access, which makes sharing with the rest of the household awkward.

A reverse proxy is the middle path: a domain name, a certificate to renew, and Home Assistant configured to trust the proxy or it will refuse the forwarded requests. All of it is doable, and all of it is yours to maintain from then on.

So the trade is not feature versus no feature. It is whether you would rather pay about A$9 a month or own a small piece of infrastructure.

How secure is the cloud route

Better than most people assume, and Nabu Casa is unusually open about the limits. Remote access is end-to-end encrypted, and the Let's Encrypt certificate and private key sit on your instance rather than on their proxy, which routes traffic without terminating TLS. Their documentation then states the residual weakness itself: because Nabu Casa owns the domain, it could in principle issue a certificate and intercept traffic. It also tells you how to check, by comparing certificate fingerprints and watching Certificate Transparency logs.

Two practical limits. Instances running known-insecure versions, currently Home Assistant Core 2021.1.4 and older, are blocked from remote access. And the originating client IP address is not passed through, so anything you have built around IP banning or geolocation will not see the real address.

So, do you need it?

No, and plenty of good setups never buy it. Here is where we land.

• Buy it if you want to reach your home from outside and do not want a second hobby. That is most households.
• Buy it if you want Alexa or Google Assistant sitting in front of Home Assistant. Doing that yourself means developer consoles, not a toggle.
• Buy it if your backups only exist on the same device Home Assistant runs on. Lose that drive and you lose the lot. Cloud backup covers the off-site copy, though only the most recent one, and only if you have kept the encryption key from your emergency kit.
• Skip it if you already run Tailscale, or a reverse proxy for something else. You have done the work.
• Skip it if you never need access from outside the house, which is more common than the forums suggest.

Voice is not a reason on its own. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech can run entirely locally with Speech-to-Phrase or Whisper plus Piper, and nothing leaves the house. Cloud voice is quicker to set up and stronger across languages, not the only option.

Take the free month before you decide. It is the only honest way to find out how often you actually open Home Assistant from outside the house.

Where the money goes

One thing worth knowing before you pay: Home Assistant is owned by the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit that says its work is primarily funded by Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions, and Nabu Casa, the company that sells the subscription, has no investors. That makes it closer to funding the software you already run than to a margin product, which is a genuine difference from most smart home subscriptions.