Advice regarding offering Hubitat as part of a Home Automation install/mgmt service?

Howdy all, I've recently discovered a Home Automation niche here in Straya that Im thinking of filling as a side hustle, but I have some questions for those who already use Hubitat as part of their service offerings.

  • Do Hubitat provide a reseller discount for low volume installers?
  • What approach do folk use for passing on the costs of Hubitat remote management/warranty. eg do you sign up the customer directly to Hubitat so you dont need to worry about passing on the costs, or sign up the account yourself so you cant be shut out either accidently or intentionally?
  • What voice assistants have folk found to be the most customer friendly and useful? (despite the issues, Alexa seems to be the easiest for our household)
  • Do folk typically charge a setup feee to bill for their time and call out fees after that?
  • do you have any general advice on dealing with end users and supporting the technologies?

Cheers Derek

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I've only seen Hubitat installed by a paid installer as part of a Control4 install where they needed/wanted things that Hubitat could support. In that situation the C4 dealer could have used HA, but Hubitat is perhaps more simple to deploy.

Honestly, if you are thinking about saving 20 dollar bucks on a Hubitat using volume your margins are too small.

The HA voice assistant is getting pretty good.

If you are not in the business work for a home automation installer for a while to get the idea of how it works. If you have a C4 dealer in your area I'd say that would be an amazing way to learn about the business and working with customers.

Not sure you can make a sane living working with products in the DIY realm.

Describe your customer and how much money you think you can make with that customer type and what you would be selling them.

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My target market is likely to be interested in simple solutions to improve their quality of life using smart outlets, some in wall switches and maybe a dashboard on an existing tablet.

I see the primary interaction being voice based and even simple Amazon echo’s would suffice.

I’m not going after the well heeled, tbh I think they are already catered for.

I use both Hubitat and Home Assistant myself, and I have no desire to support HA, HE on the other hand is very straight forward.

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What's your primary hustle?

IT Change, Incident and Problem Manager for GPC Asia Pacific.

I’m an ex IT server engineer amongst other things.

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Good context. So how frustrated would you get managing 100 sites and not being able to use something like Terraform to manage the hub configurations?

If you aren't worried about making money and you want to do it as a fun retirement thing I think it would be stimulating.

I mentioned Control4 because in many ways the pain points of managing a hub are similar accept with C4 the service call usually runs over $500 and the owners aren't messing with the settings.

If it were me I would work out the typical deploy you think you will have or what is the typical pattern.

Customer type A:
Door lock
Thermostat
Video Doorbell
Handful of light plugs

Customer B:
Home Security system
door locks
Hue bulbs
Motion sensors
Light switches
Lighting scenarios
Alexa

Customer C:
All of the above plus Sonos
Blinds
Power monitoring
Multiple users and kids

I'm guessing over time you will find you want to work with a common set of integrated products and not just any old random collection of devices. This is how it works in the higher tier smart home market. Dealers steer the customers to the things that work and are easy to manage... and with higher profit margins.

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Cheers, that’s helpful. I’m in research phase and talking to a few folk to get a better sense of the requirements. Managing the hubs manually isn’t ideal, but not a deal breaker either.

The customers I’m targeting are used to being charged at a decent hourly rate for services, so that aspect isn’t an issue. They also have decent budgets for relevant technologies. The goal is to simplify things for them, not “do amazing things” like us hobbyists like to do.

My main goal ATM is to work out if I can provide a service that won’t result in me making too much work for myself. Although to be honest, if I could convert it into an ongoing, day to day business, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I’ve already got a sparky mate who would be happy to do any electrical work I send his way. That removes any insurance risks for me too.

For simple Lamp lighting scenarios, I’m leaning towards Phillips hue. They are expensive, but reliable.

Thermostats are a pain in Australia, most systems are DC voltage with proprietary control schemes, so things like Sensibo or zwave to IR bridges are needed. So I’ll be avoiding thermostats as much as possible.

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Money to be made in lighting and security product sales and integration.

Take a look at https://chowmain.software/ They are in your part of the globe and write integrations. Since they are in your parts they integrate things more common to your area. They have a Hubitat integration to C4 and would be good contacts. They have a bunch of independent driver developers and they do custom work.

Hue is pretty easy to integrate, but the sticking point is always switches and screens.

I think over the next few years cross platform integrations are going to be big as the platform figure out how to do the majority of things people want. Like HA integrated or is the glue for lots of things. Voice is becoming more important and lots of folks are trying to get off Alexa.

I am not sure you can avoid the time suck of support calls and visits. If your customers are willing to pay and actually pay their invoices then maybe that is ok. But too many customers that expect short turn around times will stress you out and may not be physically possible.

One thing for sure if you want to use Hubitat in all places you will want to require all them to have the subscription to Protect and Remote Admin.

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I 100% agree, that's why I asked if installers usually require the homeowner to pay and manage the sub, or do most installers' manage it and pass on the cost to the homeowner.

I've tried this myself and gave up - Alexa just does most things better than Apple/Google still. The only issue is pushing ads to screen based Echo's.

Agreed, that is why I'll be sticking to the KISS principal - I started out doing on-site technical support in the 90's, so I know what this is like first hand.

I gave up on Alexa for all the reasons. I run Josh.ai. HA voice is evolving fast. Others are integrating home kit to get siri. We will see more replacement options for Alexa in the next 18 months.

The ads on the echo devices broke me. There are some hacks to remove them, but I am much happier with Josh.

Best of luck.

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I wasnt aware of that option, I'll look into it.

I'm wary of even considering using HA for customer installs, I've had too many bad experiences over the years with breaking changes. At least the Hubitat crew make a pretty good effort to regression test their releases.

Sure, but consider using HA just for voice... and If HA voice will work with Hubitat in the future.

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I will, I'll test it at home at some point - for now I'll just restrict Voice to either Echo Dot's or HomePod Mini's.

Weird i have no adds with alexa other that it suggesting stupid things at times.

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I have been able to turn them off, but Amazon seems to turn them back on every few months.

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Everything that I have been reading on the Home Assistant forum is that HA's new Voice Assistant device is definitely not ready for prime time and the Nabu Casa people even call it a "Preview" addition. It seems that the people that expect it to be comparable to Alexa or Google are extremely disappointed and the people that understand it is a Beta product are happy. I have no interest in paying $60 for a Beta product. It doesn't sound like it is ready for the 'Average Joe'.

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Thank you for your contribution. First hand knowledge is useful.

I think folks should try to respect the OP's request. Do you guys have something to add to the objective?

Agreed, after watching some videos on this, it’s definitely still very much a beta product.

TBH, I have zero desire to implement multi hub solutions for my customers, it’s massive overkill when Hubitat will cover 99.99% of the solutions I have in mind.

Honestly, I value and encourage different points of view - when solving problems, there is rarely one single solution.

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It's your thread. I'm sure it will quickly get off track.