A smart home doesn’t need to cost a lot of money, and it certainly doesn’t mean paying a monthly fee. Here are some things I do to ensure that the only money I spend on my smart home is for devices that I can use without a pricey premium plan.
Run your smart home with Home Assistant
It gives you options
Home a
Home Assistant is a free and open-source smart home operating system that prioritizes local control, device interoperability, and privacy. It also delivers a level of control that other smart home platforms simply cannot match, and that’s essential for rolling your own local alternatives to cloud-based subscriptions.
The platform runs on a device of your choosing, which could be anything from an old laptop through to a Raspberry Pi, NAS drive, or high-end server. You have access to the files that Home Assistant relies on, as well as the ability to deploy and connect other services that work in conjunction with Home Assistant.
You can expand Home Assistant with integrations, many of which are designed to circumvent cloud dependency by providing local alternatives. Home Assistant can even run apps within the operating system, which are essentially containerized applications that run alongside Home Assistant and offer even more functionality.
Whereas closed ecosystems from the likes of Google and Amazon funnel users towards subscriptions by not providing alternatives, Home Assistant is a platform that embraces openness. This can mean that it feels overwhelming for some, but it’s also worth considering that Home Assistant is only as complex as you make it.
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- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
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- Dimensions (exterior)
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83x83x179mm
- Weight
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157g
The Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 supports both Zigbee and Thread, although it must be set up for use with either one of the two protocols. It offers 4x the responsiveness of the previous model, and is designed to be easy to open for modding, with accessible pins and pads.
Don’t buy the wrong doorbell or security camera
Avoid getting locked in
Video doorbells and connected security cameras are smart home devices that many people invest in before they have built out their smart home ecosystem. You can feasibly add a camera to your home, connect it to your network, and use the manufacturer’s app to answer the door and check the feed.
But the most popular cameras from companies like Ring and Google gate many essential features behind a subscription. This includes the ability to save and retrieve footage, which feels like an essential feature when choosing to mount a camera on the front of your house. Ring Protect starts at $50 per year, while Google Home Premium (previously Nest Aware) costs $100 for the same period.
To avoid this problem, pick a camera or video doorbell that doesn’t rely on the cloud or a subscription. There are many options on the market from manufacturers like Reolink which offer alternative means of storage, including microSD or recording to a hard drive using a self-hosted service like Frigate.
If you have an iCloud+ subscription that you’re already paying for, you can even bring non-HomeKit cameras into the ecosystem and use iCloud storage for free with Scrypted.
- Resolution
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2K
- Power Source
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Battery
Reolink’s battery-powered Wi-Fi video doorbell is a great way to know who’s outside. With a 2K resolution and a 150°x150° head-to-toe view, this video doorbell can be powered either over battery or wired, depending on your existing setup.
Roll your own AI solutions
If you have the means
Large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini can make your smart home more capable and conversational, but they often come at a cost. Many video doorbells come with AI features like package detection and facial recognition that cost extra. Amazon has gone as far as launching Alexa+, a $20 monthly AI assistant subscription.
But you can add one of the main Alexa+ features to Home Assistant for free. This involves running your own LLM locally, and handling your own speech-to-text and text-to-speech generation. If you have a powerful enough server or computer with a decent GPU in it, why not put it to use to perform voice assistant and image analysis?
Though services like Gemini and ChatGPT are free to add to Home Assistant, the more you use them, the faster you’ll run out of credits. More costly operations like image analysis and speech generation will burn through credits quicker than simple text responses.
Configure remote access and backups yourself
Even Home Assistant has a subscription
Home Assistant offers remote access and backup services via Nabu Casa, an optional $6.50 monthly cloud subscription. This makes it easy to monitor your smart home from anywhere as well as keep an off-site backup in the cloud that you can restore if something goes wrong. But it’s far from the only option.
Though Home Assistant Cloud is the easiest way to add this functionality, there are other options, including using a VPN like Tailscale. By only exposing the VPN to the internet, Home Assistant and everything else running on your server is accessible without taking on the additional risk.
Personally, I’ve got an old first-generation HomePod which acts as a remote access point. By forwarding my Home Assistant devices to Apple Home, I can control everything using Apple’s infrastructure while Home Assistant remains safely walled off from the broader internet.
As for backups? You can handle them yourself by storing your Home Assistant backup files in the cloud for free using a provider like Google Drive. They’re small enough that most free storage tiers are good enough.
Building a smart home doesn’t have to be expensive. With Home Assistant at the helm, you can make the most of cheap options like IKEA’s Matter over Thread range or by shop around for cost-effective Zigbee devices.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
May 21, 2026
