Nabu Casa renames Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link
On October 2, 2026, Nabu Casa announced it is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, effective in the December release. The service itself is unchanged — what is being removed is the word ‘cloud’, deemed too tainted by Big Tech, and that is a signal for the whole self-hosted ecosystem.
October 2, 2026. Nabu Casa announces that Home Assistant Cloud is becoming Home Assistant Link. October 7, 2026. The 2026.10 release notes confirm the change will take effect with the December release. 2018. The year Nabu Casa created the service, initially to fund Home Assistant development. Why it matters: this is not a cosmetic refresh — it is a major open-source project officially removing the word “cloud” from its commercial offering, and saying openly why.
What changes, and what does not
Let us be precise about the scope. Home Assistant Link is exactly the same service as Home Assistant Cloud: remote access to your Home Assistant instance from outside, simplified Alexa and Google Home integration, voice control, backups. Existing subscriptions carry over unchanged, features do not move, and the switch happens quietly by the December 2026 release.
What changes is only the name — and the semantic baggage that comes with it. Nabu Casa owns the point: the announcement by Carl Albertsson, VP of Commercial, could not be clearer — “Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we’re renaming ours.” The word cloud has become, for both the general public and savvy users, shorthand for rising subscriptions, cascading outages and data harvesting. A connotation Nabu Casa no longer wants its service to carry.
Why “cloud” became a liability
The problem is old, and it is as technical as it is marketing. Home Assistant stands on a simple principle: home automation should run locally, in your home, and keep working when the internet drops or the vendor disappears. On stage, Paulus Schoutsen, the project’s founder and president of the Open Home Foundation, repeats “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work” — then has to explain, in the next breath, why Home Assistant Cloud is different, despite its name. That friction became untenable.
There is also a persistent misunderstanding: newcomers believe Home Assistant Cloud lets you run Home Assistant in the cloud. That has never been the case, and never will be — Nabu Casa holds that the platform should stay on your machine. The name was feeding the very confusion it was meant to clear up.
Link versus the Big Tech cloud
The announcement does more than remove a word. It draws a term-by-term comparison between Home Assistant Link and a Big Tech cloud, and that is where the positioning hardens. Optional versus required: your smart home keeps working without Link, lights and all, where a closed ecosystem stops if you cancel. No lock-in versus a walled garden: you can use Link or another service, and walk away freely, where a proprietary cloud binds you to its outages and price hikes. Private data versus monetized data: with Link your data is encrypted and only you hold the key — neither Nabu Casa nor the Open Home Foundation can read it, where Big Tech sells it to advertisers and uses it to train models. Funding a foundation versus funding shareholders: most of the profit from Link subscriptions funds the Open Home Foundation, which pays Home Assistant developers.
The table is not neutral, and it is not meant to be. It restates, in commercial language, what the community has said for years in technical language: self-hosting is not a cheaper variant of the cloud, it is a choice about who governs your data.
What it says about the ecosystem
The Nabu Casa move reaches beyond a single company. It confirms an editorial shift already visible in the sector’s newsletters: the Self-Host Weekly of October 9, 2026 leads on the rename, a sign the topic resonates far beyond the Home Assistant bubble. The word cloud is leaving the vocabulary of local-first, privacy-minded vendors, much as “dedicated server” left the hosting industry’s vocabulary fifteen years ago.
For the user, the lesson is simple and reassuring. The rename is not an alert, it is a clarification: the same promise — an optional, encrypted, lock-in-free service that funds the project — under a name that finally says what it does: link your local instance to the rest of the world, without making it depend on someone else’s cloud.
Verdict
If you already subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud, do nothing: the service is identical, your subscription carries over, and the name switches in December with no action on your part. If you were hesitating to move to self-hosting, this rename is the signal you were waiting for: the dominant local-first home-automation platform now owns its difference from closed ecosystems outright, to the point of removing the word cloud from its offer. If you run a fleet of deployments, take the method rather than the name: when a word you use to describe your service says more about your competitors than about you, removing it is a positioning move — not a branding whim.