Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link. The announcement, written by VP of Commercial Carl Albertsson, says the old name never fit: some users thought the subscription ran Home Assistant in the cloud, which it has never done, and it clashed with the project’s own advice. Founder Paulus Schoutsen would tell audiences “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work” and then have to explain that Home Assistant Cloud was different. The change becomes official in the December 2026.12 release, and feedback is open until then.
What actually changes
The service started in 2018 to answer two problems at once: remote access without a weekend of configuration, and a way to keep Home Assistant’s development funded rather than running on volunteer nights and weekends.
Nothing about the service’s shape changes. It stays optional, so the smart home works, “lights and all,” without it; there is no lock-in, so unsubscribing leaves everything running; and the data that passes through it stays encrypted with a key only the user holds. The majority of subscription profits fund the Open Home Foundation, which pays for Home Assistant’s development. What Link adds is remote access, Alexa and Google Home linking, online speech-to-text, and an online backup. The post contrasts all of it with a big-tech cloud in a side-by-side table: optional against required, no lock-in against a walled garden, private data against monetized data, a nonprofit against investors first.
The post is plain about the old name’s problems. “We had a service that we and the community loved, but the name just didn’t feel right,” Albertsson writes. The word cloud is already gone from the Nabu Casa logo, which the post notes half-seriously may be taking things too far. The post also commits to asking the community before the name goes official: “Whenever features get renamed, we always come to you, the community, first.”
The service keeps getting worked on, too: a new account page, an easier setup wizard, a speech-to-text test in Labs, and a backend migration to bare-metal servers that put users on the closest one. The project says those changes are what will let it add new security features and account tools next.
My read
The name was doing active harm. “Cloud” is the precise word for the dependency this audience avoids, and wearing it meant the service spent its life explaining what it is not. Link says what it does instead: connect outside services to a home that keeps running without them. The December window is the part to use. Framing objections are cheap to make now, and impossible to make once 2026.12 ships.
Source: the announcement.