Homey and their new business model

Lounge
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Looks like Homey is doing something that the other platforms aren't. They just adopted a self hosted model in addition to their hardware hub and bridge device. You get a 30 day trial and they are dong a one time payment. Paul Hibbert is even thinking about how much of his automatons he would be moving over from his year of configuring Home Assistant.

This is something I hope one day the Hubitat team would do. Imagine having a Docker, Proxmox, RaspberryPi, AppleTV or PC device that would run the Hubiat services and then with a USB dongle like the original Hubitat hubs you can get ZigBee, Z-Wave etc.

Here is the link to Paul's video:

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I wonder how often it has to "phone home" via the internet to authenticate your license to run it? Homey has never really been a truly local hub, has it?

I think HA still has this beat, in that Homey is pricey, and HA is free. HA can also run only local like Hubitat.

This came up in another thread, my opinion is Hubitat has no interest in doing this since it is a very hub-based business model. Maybe they would, but the license free to make up for not selling you a hub would probably be yearly, and end up costing more than buying a hub over a few years.

Wouldn't that make it Dockitat, or Proxitat, or Raspbitat.... Is it still Hubitat without the hub? :grinning:

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If the homey bridge had a wired connection this would be pretty interesting. As it is, having my zwave zigbee etc rely on WiFi is a no go. As is spending $400 on Homey Pro.

Zero confidence in the “lifetime license”. It would be quickly rendered useless when all the new features are only available on “self hosted server pro-ultra-extreme” not “self-hosted-server-classic”

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I am going to setup the proxmox version this weekend just to try out what it is and isn't. I should be able to tell if/when it phone's home.

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As promised, I reviewed and installed Homey's published install script and documentation to see how Homey Self-Hosted Server actually works with Proxmox. The short version: it looks better from the outside than it actually is. I had to make serious edits to the install script because of these assumptions Homey made about a Proxmox environment.

What was promised

They announced Homey Self-Hosted Server. The idea is to run the Homey Pro operating system on your own hardware - Proxmox, Raspberry Pi, Synology, Docker, TrueNAS, and others. $149 lifetime license or $4.99/month. Sounded compelling to me.

The install script

I pulled apart their install script and it raises some concerns for anyone running a proper homelab.

Network configuration is essentially nonexistent. It drops everything on vmbr0 with DHCP and no VLAN tagging option. If you're running IoT isolation (and you should be), this doesn't fit. No static IP, no DNS override, no VLAN tag parameter.

The template is hardcoded to a specific Debian 13.1 release with no dynamic lookup. Right now it looks like they are only supporting 13.1 specifically.

The Docker container runs with --privileged and --network host inside the LXC. That bypasses all network namespace isolation. The whole point of putting it in an LXC is containment - they defeat that immediately.

Every time the LXC boots, it pulls whatever image is current from Athom's registry. No version pinning, no digest verification. They can push anything to that container and it executes on your hardware automatically on next reboot.

I modified the script to properly set the container ID and place it on my IoT VLAN — that part works — but the --privileged and --network host flags inside the container remain Homey's defaults.

License - The Elephant in the Room

This is the real issue. The "lifetime license" is not a license key you hold locally. Their own documentation states initial activation requires internet connectivity and ties to your account. The pull-on-boot model isn't just for updates - it's almost certainly how ongoing license validation works. Let the subscription lapse or lose connectivity to their registry and you likely get a non-functional image on next restart.

This isn't self-hosted in any meaningful sense. It's a cloud-dependent subscription product that happens to run a container on your hardware.

What motives does LG have?

Here's the part that doesn't get enough attention. Homey's parent is / was Athom and it was acquired by LG Electronics in 2024.

We've seen this movie before. Samsung acquired SmartThings in 2014. At acquisition it was an independent, community-focused platform with a passionate user base. Samsung's strategic interest wasn't your home automation reliability - it was making Samsung appliances and TVs stickier in the ecosystem. The roadmap gradually shifted to reflect that. Hub hardware was sunset. The platform moved progressively cloud-dependent. A significant portion of this community exists because of how that story ended.

LG already has their own smart home platform - ThinQ. They acquired Athom because ThinQ never gained real traction with the broader smart home community. So now LG has two platforms and an integration story to figure out. Where Homey SHS fits in that consolidation is an open question - and it will be answered in a boardroom in Seoul, not by the homelabber or home automation communities.

The "lifetime license" question gets darker in this context. Athom as an independent company had reputational skin in the game. As an LG subsidiary, the decision to honor $149 lifetime commitments gets made by people whose primary concern is LG's appliance ecosystem roadmap. Wink, SmartThings, Iris - they all worked great right up until a corporate decision made them not work at all.

My Final Thoughts

Homey software looks like polished software with a good app ecosystem. For someone coming from a plug-and-play hub background the UI is genuinely impressive. But it's not the offline appliance model this I would be looking for. As I may make the same assumption for why we are on Hubitat.

The plus to Hubitat's model - firmware update when you want, hub you own and it works indefinitely on your LAN with zero upstream dependency, radios on the device - is a fundamentally different architecture.

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Money wise, if you take into account the cost of the host system, the license fee and the bridge. That makes it pricier than a C8pro to get the 433Mhz support advantage.

Also, normally the bridge needs a premium subscription to support more than 5 devices. I could not find anywhere if that was included in the server license fee. On top of that, the bridge has no ethernet connection, which makes no sense.

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way pricier when I can add a RMPro via HE integration for IR, 433 & 315MHz for about 45 bucks.

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Wow, that's a game-over bit of info, regardless of all the other issues that @ronv42 raised so clearly (and thank you).

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Boo, hiss.... surely the speculation here had at least another couple of days left to go.... But you had to offer up your scientific-based opinions.... clear and concrete reasoning... tsk, tsk.... :rofl: :rofl:

Glad I have made the right choice.... so far.

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Thanks @sburke781 Yes I had free time to do my install, configuration and start the trial period. It was shocking how little effort they did to fully understand what it means to support various platforms. I think the goal was for marketing material verses honoring the platforms architectures such as I found out with Proxmox.

Outside of Paul Hibbert hyping it on his channel there has been very little public feedback on Homey's/LG's shift. Only time will tell if they can build momentum in the marketplace.

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PH/LG + Ron.... :slight_smile:

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There's the problem. No one should be listening to, or taking advice from, that quack.

I could not dislike his videos or speaking style more if I actually tried to. :person_shrugging:

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100%

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Case in point... With tongue firmly planted in cheek..... :stuck_out_tongue:

Been a while since I've seen you round here @JasonJoel , glad to see you posting (seems to be be my bad... you've been "active" as they say, recently...).

Fair enough re Paul, his style has drifted from my preferred style.... I think he still genuinely tests the devices/platforms he presents.... but yes, the over-the-top presentation style is not my cup-of-tea...

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I was mainly teasing. :slight_smile: His videos aren't my cup of tea, that's true, but I know a lot of others like him - and that's fine.

I'm still poking around on this forum on and off. My hubitat is chugging away doing its job, so not a lot to post about (in a good way).

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Prob the same for me, x2

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And yeah, while an easy target. I'm also not a harsh critic of Paul's, seen him offer up quite a raw and real vision of himself....

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Probably my responsibility to guide this conversation back to Homey.... Sigh....

Ron...? How's the install performing...

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Or for others to deviate the conversation more than I have... :wink:

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I gave Homey's Self Hosted Server (SHS) a quick try on a spare Raspberry Pi back when they first released it. I just didn't see the attraction, especially once I spent a little bit of in their forum. The built-in Zigbee and Z-Wave support, especially using their WiFi connected Zigbee/Z-Wave bridge, is full of problems. So much so, that many users stand up their own Zigbee2MQTT server to get reliable Zigbee performance. I also did not like that their licensing model is tied to their cloud server. I completely understand why they do it that way, but I much prefer that a system that is supposed to be LOCAL, actually be able to run completely local. Paul definitely got it wrong (as he is often apt to do) when he said that even if Homey was to go away as a company, that since it is running locally on your own hardware that it would still work forever. That seems a bit optimistic IMHO. Then, there are a ton of posts about how problematic getting Matter devices to work properly with Homey SHS was. Not sure if they have fixed any of that but seems short-sighted that they didn't have that figured out before they released it. Also, I did not like that updates are forced upon the user whenever they reboot the system. No thanks! I didn't like when SmartThings would force updates upon my hub, would rather not have to deal with that nightmare again.

Hubitat and Home Assistant are the best solutions, for my requirements. I am pretty pleased using Hubitat as my primary platform and using Home Assistant to augment it for special cases.