According to The How-To Geek, Nabu Casa Inc. is a company founded in 2018 in Irvine, California, by Home Assistant project founders Paulus Schoutsen and Pascal Vizeli. Its primary service is Home Assistant Cloud, an optional $6.50 monthly subscription for remote access and cloud backups. The company also designs hardware, including the $159 Home Assistant Green plug-and-play server and the $59 Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition smart speaker. In late 2025, it released an updated ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread radio. Crucially, Nabu Casa uses revenue from these streams to sponsor the free, open-source Home Assistant software and maintain its ad-free community forum.
The Open-Source Funding Model That Works
Here’s the thing about successful open-source projects: they eventually need money to pay for servers, developers, and… well, lights. Home Assistant faced this classic dilemma. The solution wasn’t venture capital or selling user data. It was Nabu Casa. This is a brilliantly pragmatic model. You get a powerful, free, and local-first platform. But if you want the convenience of easy remote access or you just want to support the project, you can pay for a cloud service. It’s a voluntary exchange that keeps the core mission intact. No ads, no data harvesting, just a straightforward value proposition. How many other smart home ecosystems can say that?
More Than Just a Cloud Service
But Nabu Casa’s evolution into hardware is maybe the more interesting story. It started with cloud, but now they’re making the physical keys to your smart home castle. The Home Assistant Green and the wireless adapters like the ZBT-1 are strategic. They lower the barrier to entry dramatically. You don’t need to hunt for a compatible Raspberry Pi or fuss with SD card images. It’s plug-and-play. This is huge for growing the user base beyond tinkerers. And by selling first-party radios for Zigbee, Thread, and Z-Wave, they’re ensuring a high-quality, supported experience for the wireless networks that matter. They’re not just funding software; they’re curating the entire reliable, local-first hardware stack.
The Community Is the Secret Sauce
This might be the most underrated part of the whole operation. That ad-free community forum? It’s everything. In a world where “support” means a useless chatbot or a buried contact form, having a vibrant, expert-led forum funded by Nabu Casa is a massive competitive advantage. It reminds me of the old web, too. It’s where the project’s soul lives. People help each other, share insane automations, and troubleshoot together. By funding this, Nabu Casa isn’t just paying for servers—it’s nourishing the ecosystem that makes Home Assistant actually work for normal people. Without that, the software alone would be far more daunting.
So, Should You Pay Nabu Casa?
Look, you can absolutely use Home Assistant 100% for free. You can set up your own VPN, handle your own backups, and buy third-party hardware. But the question isn’t about capability; it’s about support and convenience. Buying the Green or a SkyConnect adapter, or subscribing to the cloud service, is a direct investment into the project’s independence. You’re voting with your wallet for a privacy-focused, user-controlled smart home future. In an industry dominated by Google, Amazon, and Apple, that’s a pretty powerful statement to make. And you get some pretty slick, easy-to-use gear out of it, too. Basically, if you believe in what Home Assistant is doing, supporting Nabu Casa is the most direct way to ensure it keeps doing it.
