Home Assistant is renaming its Cloud subscription service, with smart home specialist saying the new Home Assistant Link name better reflects what the service actually does.

Carl Albertsson, VP of Commercial at Nabu Casa - the commercial company behind Home Assistant - announced the change in a blog post , claiming that the word “cloud” creates the wrong impression for a platform designed to run locally in the home.

“Big Tech ruined the cloud,” he said, pointing to the subscription price rises, outages, data harvesting and lock-in that have come to define many online services.

Home Assistant Link will continue to provide the same core connected features, including remote access to a Home Assistant setup, easier connections to Alexa and Google Home, online backups, speech-to-text and access to customer support.

The subscription remains totally optional. Home Assistant itself will continue to run locally without Link.

That distinction is important to Nabu Casa, which says it doesn’t want Home Assistant to follow the typical smart-home model where cloud connectivity is required for products and services to keep working.

Matter, of course, is emerging as a way of everyday folk (those unfamiliar with YAML files) to get their Big Tech driven smart homes out of the cloud but’s always been a sticking point for smart homes “purists.”

Nabu Casa says it doesn’t want access to customers’ data and that the majority of its subscription profits are contributed to the Open Home Foundation, which supports Home Assistant development.

Link has also been going through some upgrades behind the scenes, including new bare-metal infrastructure designed to route users to nearby servers for faster remote access.

There’s also a newly redesigned account page, a simpler setup process and experimental online speech-to-text features.

The Home Assistant Link official renaming is planned for the December 2026.12 release.

Home Assistant is also making another change aimed at making the platform easier to use.

The guys over at Matter Alpha have reported that HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, is being brought into Core as a built-in component called Marketplace, giving users a place inside Settings to find and install community integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates.

The move would be a pretty hefty improvement for newcomers, particularly those whose devices aren’t supported by Home Assistant out of the box.

Marketplace will make community-created additions easier to find, install and update without requiring users to set up HACS separately, although the projects will remain community-maintained rather than officially supported by Home Assistant.

The Marketplace work is apparently, according to that Matter Alpha report, being merged into Home Assistant’s development branches, with Core 2026.11 purportedly targeted for release.