Some smart home devices that demand a premium price tag, whether that’s in service of features you depend on, reliability, or to guarantee safety. Thankfully, there are plenty of opportunities to save money too.

The following items are, in my opinion, worth shopping around for in pursuit of a bargain.

Home Assistant servers

Any old computer will do

Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek

Home Assistant is a free and open-source smart home platform that runs on just about everything. While you can purchase server solutions like Home Assistant Green, you absolutely don’t need to. Any old computer, laptop, or existing hardware will do—especially when you’re just getting started.

I’d recommend firing up a Home Assistant server using any existing hardware you have. You can run the operating system in a virtual machine, fire up a Docker container, install it on your NAS or existing home server, or use a spare Raspberry Pi (even if it only has 1GB of RAM).

Once you’re settled and happy with the platform, you can entertain the idea of finding the perfect server on which to run Home Assistant and other local services (hint: it’s a mini PC).

Bluetooth proxies

Give me ESP32 or give me death

Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

Bluetooth is one of the simplest ways of adding presence monitoring to your smart home. Best of all, you can create your own using a framework like ESPHome and a cheap $5 ESP32 chip. You don’t even need to connect to Bluetooth in order for this to work, since the proxy detects the proximity of devices like your smartphone to figure out where you are.

This lets you do things like locate people (or pets with Bluetooth tags) quickly, keep the lights on when you’re around, or do things when the house (or certain areas) are empty. You can also use these proxies to control nearby Bluetooth devices like SwitchBot blinds and curtain openers.

Most sensors

Build them yourself or shop around

Sensors are vital for automating many aspects of your smart home, and the cheap ones often work just as well as those that cost twice as much. The one exception I’ll make here is water leak sensors, since I’m not convinced it’s worth saving a few bucks when the sensor’s job is to save you thousands in water damage.

One of the cheapest ways to add a mmWave presence sensor to your home is to build one yourself and use ESPHome to incorporate the sensor into Home Assistant. While even established companies like IKEA now offer cheap battery-powered temperature and humidity sensors, you can build them for comparable cost and even hide them inside photo frames.

But you can go even further and look on marketplaces like AliExpress for rock-bottom prices. This is one of the best places to find cheap Zigbee devices now that IKEA is out of the game.

Smart bulbs

The most expendable smart home devices

Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek

Smart bulbs are “worse” than smart switches for a number of reasons. For starters, you need to make sure the device or light fitting they’re plugged into is on all of the time. Second, they burn out like any other bulb and require changing every few years. They also happen to be more expensive than a standard bulb.

There are some upsides, though. They’re almost always dimmable, and you can buy fancy color-changing ones to set the mood depending on how you’re feeling. Even so, for general usage, it’s not worth spending big bucks on fancy Philips Hue offerings when cheap alternatives do the job just fine.

The only exception I’ll make is “feature” bulbs, like faux filament LED options that make sense in a signal light.

LED strip lighting

Make your own for a fraction of the price

Credit: Hope05/Shutterstock.com

A little while ago I bought a cheap IKEA Zigbee LED strip light because it was in the Zigbee fire sale. Even for the price I paid, it was expensive compared to using a cheap ESP32 or ESP8266 microcontroller with a NeoPixel LED strip and the WLED firmware.

Not only is rolling your own fairly simple and considerably cheaper, but it also gives you ultimate control over the precise size of your strips, the density of LEDs, and the option to add extra hardware like microphones for sound-reactive lighting.

Smart lighting options from premium manufacturers like Govee exist, but once you’ve seen how much cheaper it is to grab a roll of LEDs and some microcontrollers (which can be used in multiple projects), you’ll want to reach for the soldering iron and do it yourself.

The inverse is true too. There are a number of smart home devices that I’d never cheap out on.