Nabu Casa renames Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link

Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud, its subscription service for remote access and online extras, to Home Assistant Link. The company announced the change on October 2 and said the new name will become official with the December 2026.12 release of Home Assistant.

In a blog post, Carl Albertsson, vice president of commercial at Nabu Casa, wrote that the word cloud no longer describes what the service actually does. From ever-increasing subscription prices to outages and data harvesting, he said, Big Tech has given the cloud a bad name, while Link is meant to stay private, optional and free of lock-in.

Why the old name never fit

Home Assistant began as a nights-and-weekends project by its core developers, and Nabu Casa was founded in 2018 to make that work sustainable. Home Assistant Cloud was created to solve a common problem: reaching your smart home when you are away, without spending a weekend on setup. A majority of the profits from subscriptions now funds the Open Home Foundation.

The name, however, created friction. Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and president of the Open Home Foundation, has told audiences not to buy products that require the cloud, then had to explain why Home Assistant Cloud is different. New users also assumed Home Assistant itself runs in the cloud. It does not: the platform is designed to always run locally, in your home.

What Link promises

The post contrasts Link with a typical Big Tech cloud: the service is optional, so the smart home keeps working without it, and users are never locked in. Data is encrypted and, in Nabu Casa's words, only the user holds the key; the company and the foundation say they do not want that data. If a subscription ends, the smart home keeps working.

Link remains the easy path to extras: connecting Alexa and Google Home, online speech-to-text that the company says is faster and supports more languages than self-hosted options, online backups, and support from real people.

More than a name change

Alongside the rename, Nabu Casa has moved its backend to a new bare-metal setup that routes users to the closest server for faster remote access. The company says the update also enables new security features and account management tools. Recent additions include a new account page, a speech-to-text test in Labs and a new settings page with a setup wizard.

Because the change touches a product name, Nabu Casa is asking the community for feedback before December, when the rename becomes official in the 2026.12 release.