The Home Assistant Green smart home hub will be sold on Amazon this year, the first time the organization will sell directly to consumers. A new line of Home Assistant Connect dongles for Thread / Zigbee and Z-Wave will follow. These connect the hub to gadgets that use those protocols (and will replace the SkyConnect dongle.
and more … The little smart home platform that could
yes… I know… I probably should not have posted in this thread 
yup, the article actually mentions that transition specifically. I think they key difference is their new separation between all the moving parts of their eco system. only Nabu Casa is for-profit and their only responsibility is hardware development and sales and cloud service for things like outside voice assistants, TTS and remote access. The Home Assistant software itself is part of a separate entity. SO if you’re a super-nerd you can still run Home Assistant totally yourself. If you’re a normal person, you pay for the hardware and pay the relatively affordable Nabu Casa subscription.
Maybe this needs to be split into its own post? 
Done. Carry on. 
(There are multiple community members using both home assistant and SmartThings, typically because the SmartThings app is still much better.)
From a hardware standpoint, a couple cool things for HA in that article:
Will be interested to see the price on the dongle. But if the Green stays around $100, then i’m guessing a new HA user could buy the Green and new dongle for less than $200 and be off to the races with just about any device HA supports.
That was one of the reasons I didn’t buy it, there was no stock or shipped from a small store in another country that was expensive.
It’s a double-edged sword though, going mainstream mean more people will buy it because it’s easier to purchase, but I can’t imagine the average user understanding they have to pay 75€ a year just to be able to link it to Google Assistant or turn off the smart light they forgot when they’re not home. Subscription fatigue is a reality more than ever.
Could be, but in the last six months, lots of SmartHome features have gone to subscription. Alexa moved some options including Alexa Guard to that model. Roku, WYZE, Ring, ecobee—even eWeLink have increased the number of features now behind a subscription. Aqara added a cloud storage subscription for people, not using HomeKit security video.
Homeseer has Long used a paid subscription model for anything involving the cloud, including voice assistants:
Even Phillips hue has added an annual subscription plan for its new security features:
So while I agree there will always be some consumers who are resistant to any subscription fees, they are now pretty common in the industry. 
Yeah, but it’s usually for value-added features. I think nobody asks for a monthly fee to turn on a Zigbee smart light while away. For something mainstream that can be a bad precedent.
Official HA products should be a solution with at least basic remote features included out of the box without the user needing to open ports or use tunnels, which most won’t know how to do it and will even compromise their networks trying to save some bucks. Then, sure, pay for value added services like text to speech, advanced voice recognition, AI and whatnot.
Now Homey Pro is making some noise in the media because it’s apparently user-friendly and powerful at the same time. However, the usual complain is that $399 is too expensive. It’s subscription-free though if you pay those $399, the average user doing the math may realise it’s cheaper than HA green + dongle + annual subscription with prices that are rising.
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