Questions about habbb, answered

habbb is a managed Home Assistant service. Home Assistant is the most capable open-source smart home platform in existence, but it needs ongoing care — updates, backups, monitoring, and the occasional fix when an integration breaks. habbb is the service layer on top of it. You either buy a pre-configured hub from us or let us adopt the Home Assistant you already run, and from then on we handle the boring maintenance work remotely so the system stays working without you having to learn YAML.

Pick a path on habbb.com — either the £150 hardware kit (Raspberry Pi 5, internal SSD, case, PSU, optional Zigbee/Thread radio) plus £30/month, or Bring Your Own Home Assistant at £40/month if you already run a Pi or NUC. Submit your email, answer a short questionnaire about your devices, and we ship the kit within two working days or schedule the BYOHA adoption session. You plug in ethernet and power; we do the rest remotely.

During the US validation phase the only path is Bring Your Own Home Assistant — $60/month plus state sales tax. You need a Raspberry Pi, NUC, mini-PC or VM running Home Assistant on your network. The fastest path: subscribe directly via the Stripe checkout linked from any of the US guides. Once your subscription is live, we email you to book a 30-minute onboarding screen-share where we install our management agents, the secure tunnel, monitoring and backups. If you have multiple properties or want a portfolio rate, email us before subscribing — that conversation is welcome and the per-door rate at scale is different from the single-property rate. We do not ship hardware kits to US addresses.

No. The kit path is designed for people who have never touched Home Assistant — you plug a pre-configured hub into ethernet and power and we take it from there. You drive the system through a clean dashboard and a phone app, not through configuration files. The Bring Your Own Home Assistant path assumes you have at least installed Home Assistant once, but it does not assume you are comfortable maintaining it long-term.

On the kit path, the hub typically ships within two working days and is online minutes after you plug it in. The first onboarding session — adopting your devices, building your starter automations and dashboard, configuring remote access — usually takes 60 to 90 minutes of scheduled time, mostly conversational. On Bring Your Own Home Assistant, adoption of an existing instance is typically completed inside a single session, with no downtime to your running automations.

You can still start with habbb, but the value is limited until you add devices. Home Assistant only becomes useful once it has things to control — lights, heating, sensors, energy meters, cameras. If you are starting from scratch, we suggest beginning with one category (lighting or heating is most common) and growing from there. We can recommend what to buy first during onboarding, though purchasing the devices is your responsibility.

Two pricing options, both inclusive of UK VAT. The kit path is £150 one-time for the pre-configured Raspberry Pi 5 hardware plus £30 per month for the managed service. The Bring Your Own Home Assistant path is £40 per month with no hardware purchase, because we adopt the Pi or mini-PC you already own. Both subscriptions are month-to-month with no minimum term.

During US validation we offer Bring Your Own Home Assistant only, at $60 per month. There is no hardware kit and no setup fee. State sales tax is added at checkout where applicable. The subscription is month-to-month with no contract.

The subscription covers maintenance — keeping what you have working. Anything that adds new capability is quoted separately before work starts: simple new automations from £45, new integration categories from £75. There are no hidden platform fees, no per-device charges and no usage caps. UK prices include VAT. US prices have state sales tax added at checkout where applicable. Regulatory compliance for any devices you add — electrical, building, energy — remains your responsibility.

No. The subscription is month-to-month and you can cancel at any time with no exit fee. The hardware kit, if you buy one, is yours to keep — you own the Raspberry Pi and SSD outright after purchase. There is no rental component and no clawback if you cancel early.

The kit path costs £150 one-time for the hardware plus £30 per month for the service. The Bring Your Own Home Assistant path skips the hardware purchase but costs £40 per month for the service. Over the first year the kit path totals £510 while BYOHA totals £480; from year two onward BYOHA costs £120 more annually. Pick the kit if you want a turnkey unit shipped to you; pick BYOHA if you already own working hardware you would rather not replace.

Adopting an existing Home Assistant instance is more work than provisioning a fresh one. Every BYOHA install is a different operating system, network setup, integration mix and historical configuration, and we have to discover all of that before we can support it reliably. The £10 per month uplift covers that ongoing discovery cost — diagnosing edge cases that do not exist on standardised kit hubs. The kit path is cheaper per month because every kit hub is identical to every other kit hub.

There is no published portfolio rate at this stage of the service. If you need to manage Home Assistant across more than one home — a primary residence and a holiday let, for example, or several rental properties — contact us directly and we will quote based on the specifics. Each property still needs its own hub and its own subscription, but we can simplify billing and onboarding when several are signed up together.

Daily encrypted backups to S3 with 30-day retention, tested Home Assistant Core and add-on updates, 24/7 automated health monitoring with alerts when something breaks, secure remote access through a Cloudflare tunnel with no inbound ports opened on your router, and human support for fixes and small tweaks to existing automations. Think of it as a boiler service contract for your smart home — we keep the system you have working.

New automations and new device-category integrations are not included — they are quoted as one-off projects before work begins, from £45 for a simple automation and from £75 for a new integration category. In the US, hardware sales are not yet available, so you must supply your own Home Assistant instance. Regulatory compliance for the devices you install — electrical certification, building consent, energy supplier rules — remains your responsibility, not ours.

Yes, but new automations are quoted separately from the subscription. The subscription covers tweaks to automations that already exist — adjusting a schedule, changing a temperature threshold, swapping a trigger. Building a brand-new automation from scratch starts at £45 and we agree the price before any work begins. There is no surprise billing — if something falls outside the subscription, we tell you and quote it.

Yes. Adopting your existing devices into Home Assistant during onboarding is included. Adding a new device of a category you already have — another Hue bulb, another Tado radiator valve — is also included as routine maintenance. Adding a brand-new category of device that requires a new integration to be configured (for example, your first solar inverter, your first EV charger, your first Zigbee stack) is quoted as a one-off project from £75.

Yes. The Home Assistant instance is yours, the hardware it runs on is yours, and the configuration is yours. habbb has remote administrative access while you are a subscriber, but nothing about the setup is locked to us. There are no proprietary clouds you depend on, no licences you would lose if you cancel, and no devices that stop working without our service. Home Assistant is open source and stays that way under our management.

Your Home Assistant keeps running. The hardware is yours, the configuration is yours, your devices keep working exactly as they did the day before. If habbb shut down, we would publish documentation for self-managing the instance, open-source any custom add-ons or scripts we deployed, and revoke our remote access cleanly. There is no vendor lock-in by design — Home Assistant is open source and that is the deliberate foundation of the service.

habbb has administrative access to your Home Assistant instance, which means we can read its configuration, its logs, the state of its entities (which devices are on, what temperature a sensor reports) and its automation history. We do not record video or audio from cameras or microphones, we do not extract device telemetry into our own analytics, and we do not log your day-to-day routines into any system outside your own hub. We access state when troubleshooting; we do not stream it.

Your live Home Assistant data lives on the hub in your home — that is the primary store. Encrypted backups are sent nightly to AWS S3 in the eu-west-1 region (Ireland), with 30-day retention. Backup encryption keys are held by habbb so we can restore on your behalf. No personal data is processed outside the UK or EU under normal operation. habbb is registered with the UK ICO and operates under UK GDPR.

Your live Home Assistant data lives on the hub in your home. Encrypted backups are sent nightly to AWS S3 in a US region with 30-day retention, and backup encryption keys are held by habbb so we can restore on your behalf. We do not transfer customer data outside the US under normal operation. We comply with applicable state privacy laws including CCPA in California, VCDPA in Virginia and CPA in Colorado.

Yes. habbb operates under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) as the supervisory authority. You have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to request correction or deletion, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with the ICO if you are unhappy with how we handle your data. Our privacy policy on habbb.com lists the legal basis for each category of processing.

Yes. habbb complies with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for California residents and with comparable state laws including the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) and the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA). You have the right to know what personal information we collect, to request deletion, to correct inaccurate information, and to opt out of any sale or sharing of personal data. habbb does not sell personal data and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Yes. Home Assistant keeps its own administrative audit log of every login and configuration change, and our access goes through that same log — we have no back door. You can review the log at any time in the Home Assistant UI under Settings, and you can revoke our access entirely with one click, which will end the management session immediately. We can also produce a written summary of accesses on request.

No. habbb does not sell, rent, license or trade your personal data or your smart home data, and does not share it for advertising purposes. We use sub-processors only for the infrastructure we depend on — AWS for backup storage, Cloudflare for the secure tunnel — and those sub-processors are bound by data processing agreements that prohibit them from using your data for their own purposes. The full list is in our privacy policy.

Effectively all of them. Home Assistant has more than 3,000 integrations covering Philips Hue, Tado, Hive, Drayton, Nest, Ring, Sonos, IKEA, Aqara, Shelly, TP-Link, Tuya, Octopus Energy, Bambu Lab, Tesla, MyEnergi, Enphase and most major smart home brands sold in the UK and US. If a device exposes a documented API, an MQTT interface or sits on Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread or Matter, habbb can integrate it. Custom or unusual integrations are quoted as a one-off if they fall outside the routine.

Yes. The Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) provides community-maintained integrations and dashboards beyond the core ones, and habbb supports installing and maintaining them on your hub. We test HACS integrations against the same update cycle as the rest of your stack so a community update does not silently break your automations. Note that HACS integrations are by definition third-party — if one is abandoned upstream, we will tell you and propose alternatives.

The Hive app talks to British Gas's Hive cloud, which relays commands to your Hive hub and then to your thermostat, radiator valves, plugs or lights over Zigbee. Everything routes through the internet, so the app stops working during a Hive outage. Home Assistant has a built-in Hive integration that signs in with your Hive account and exposes the same heating, hot water and device controls as Home Assistant entities. You still depend on the Hive cloud, but you gain one dashboard alongside your other brands, plus automations Hive's own app cannot do. habbb adopts an existing Hive setup into Home Assistant as part of onboarding.

Both have solid Home Assistant integrations. Hive is cloud-only, so its controls in Home Assistant stop responding during a Hive outage; Tado offers a local API on recent firmware, which can keep working when the internet drops. Tado's per-room TRV control and open-window detection are stronger for multi-room zoning, while Hive is often cheaper and simpler if you want one thermostat and basic hot-water scheduling. For Home Assistant specifically, Tado's local fallback gives it the edge on reliability. Whichever you own, habbb adopts it into Home Assistant and keeps the integration working through brand and Home Assistant updates.

Both are strong multi-room heating systems that work well with Home Assistant. Drayton Wiser uses a local Zigbee hub, so its controls stay responsive without the internet and there is no subscription — a one-off hardware cost. Tado historically leaned on its cloud but now offers a local API on recent firmware, and its geofencing and open-window detection are more refined out of the box. Wiser tends to be cheaper to expand room by room. For a deeper breakdown, see our guide at habbb.com/guides/drayton-wiser-vs-tado. habbb manages either system once it is in Home Assistant.

Both are supported. ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) is the integration built into Home Assistant directly; Zigbee2MQTT is a separate add-on that runs alongside an MQTT broker. We adopt whichever stack you are already running and have no preference between them — both are actively maintained and both work well. New kit hubs ship with ZHA by default because it is one fewer moving part.

Yes, but a migration is a one-off project rather than routine maintenance because every Zigbee device has to be re-paired to the new coordinator and any automations that reference Zigbee entity IDs need updating. We quote the work in advance based on how many devices you have and how many automations depend on them, typically starting at £75. Once the migration is complete, ongoing management of the new stack is included in the subscription as normal.

Yes. Common UK setups we manage include MyEnergi Eddi and Zappi, Marlec Solar iBoost+, Shelly Pro 3EM clamps, Lux Power batteries, Enphase microinverter systems, GivEnergy hardware, and Octopus Energy tariff integration including Octopus Agile dynamic pricing. Adopting an existing solar or battery setup into Home Assistant is a one-off project quoted from £75, after which ongoing management — updates, monitoring, automation tweaks — is covered by the subscription.

Yes. Common US setups we manage include Enphase microinverter systems via Envoy, Tesla Powerwall, Sense home energy monitors, SolarEdge inverters, and EV chargers exposed through OCPP or vendor APIs. Net Energy Metering 3.0 export-tariff optimisation is a frequent automation request in California. Adopting an existing solar or storage setup is a one-off project quoted from the equivalent of £75 in USD; ongoing management is then covered by the subscription.

Only if you want to control Zigbee devices directly. A Zigbee coordinator is a small USB stick that lets Home Assistant talk to Zigbee bulbs, sensors and plugs without their manufacturer's own hub or cloud. If all your devices already run through a hub like the Philips Hue Bridge or a SmartThings hub, you do not need a coordinator — Home Assistant talks to that hub instead. You only need one if you want to ditch those hubs, or if you own Zigbee devices that never came with a hub. Thread devices need a Thread border router rather than a Zigbee coordinator, though some sticks do both.

The Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is the strongest current pick for most UK users. It is the official adapter from the makers of Home Assistant, handles both Zigbee and Thread (one at a time), and is roughly four times faster than the previous ZBT-1. It works with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT out of the box and uses a USB-C connection. The Sonoff ZBDongle-E is a capable cheaper alternative. For the full comparison and buying advice, see our guide at habbb.com/guides/best-zigbee-stick-uk. habbb can add the ZBT-2 to a kit hub for £60.

The Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 is the official adapter from the Open Home Foundation: it supports Zigbee and Thread, is about four times faster than its predecessor, and gets first-class firmware support. The Sonoff ZBDongle-E (also Silicon Labs EFR32-based) is a popular budget option that also works with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT, while the older Sonoff ZBDongle-P uses a Texas Instruments chip with no Thread support. For most people the ZBT-2 is the safer long-term choice because it tracks Home Assistant's own roadmap; the Sonoff sticks remain solid if budget is the priority. habbb manages whichever coordinator you run.

In the UK, the kit is a Raspberry Pi 5, an internal NVMe SSD mounted inside the case (not dangling off USB), a case with NVMe carrier support, and the official Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C power supply that the Pi 5 requires for full USB current. The hub arrives with Home Assistant OS pre-flashed and pre-configured, so you plug in ethernet and power and it comes online. A Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 Zigbee/Thread radio is a £60 optional add-on for direct-Zigbee or Thread devices.

Three reasons. First, the Raspberry Pi 5 power supply we use is a UK Type-G plug — shipping a UK PSU into the US is not a clean experience. Second, customs and import duties on a low-margin £150 kit make the transatlantic logistics economically marginal. Third, hardware warranty replacement across the Atlantic is slow. During US validation we therefore offer Bring Your Own Home Assistant only, where you supply the hardware and we manage what runs on it.

Yes. That is the Bring Your Own Home Assistant path. We adopt your existing instance — Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, Intel NUC, generic mini-PC, or a virtual machine on a home server — installing our management agents, the secure tunnel, monitoring and backups onto it. There is no reflash and no migration downtime. We do require the underlying hardware to be reasonably current and reliable; we will tell you during the questionnaire if your kit is too old to support.

On the UK kit path, if the hardware we shipped you fails during normal use, we send a replacement unit pre-configured with the latest backup of your system. Swap the SSD into the new Pi, plug in ethernet and power, and your setup is back online — usually within a working day of confirming the fault. The original Pi is yours to keep or return. SSDs and PSUs are covered the same way.

On the Bring Your Own Home Assistant path, replacement hardware is your responsibility — you buy a new Raspberry Pi or mini-PC locally and we handle restoring your Home Assistant onto it from the latest backup. Restoration is included in the subscription. Because backups run nightly and are stored off-site, the worst case is losing one day of state history rather than your whole configuration, automations or device pairings.

Yes, through the Bring Your Own Home Assistant path. If you already own a Home Assistant Yellow or Home Assistant Green, we adopt and manage it the same way we manage a Raspberry Pi or NUC. Home Assistant Green is Nabu Casa's current pre-built option ($199 RRP); Home Assistant Yellow is no longer in production as of early 2026 (remaining stock is kit-only with a separately-purchased CM4), so we do not recommend buying a new Yellow, but we are happy to support one you already run. We do not ship Yellow or Green as the default kit because our own Pi 5 plus internal SSD is more reliable and easier to source.

During UK business hours (Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time), we typically respond within a few hours, often faster. Outside business hours and at weekends, response is best-effort and asynchronous — usually next business day. Critical hub-down alerts are caught by automated 24/7 monitoring, and we will reach out to you proactively if your hub goes offline, even if you have not yet noticed. We do not publish a contractual SLA at this stage.

Not currently. All support is asynchronous — email, the support form on habbb.com, and scheduled video calls for onboarding and for occasional troubleshooting that benefits from screen sharing. Asynchronous support means we can give every customer thoughtful, written answers rather than rushed phone responses, and it lets one operator support a growing roster without quality dropping. If a video call is the right tool, we will book one.

Human support runs UK business hours, Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time. Automated health monitoring of every hub runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week — if your hub goes offline at 3am, the system pages us and we will react in the morning unless the alert escalation rules indicate something genuinely urgent. Out-of-hours response is best-effort and asynchronous; we do not currently staff a night shift.

Not at the moment. habbb is in validation, which means the founder runs operations directly and you talk to the same person every time you contact support. There is no front-line tier reading from a script and no handoff between teams. As habbb grows, the support model will evolve, but the design goal is to keep direct human contact rather than insert an account-manager layer between you and the engineer fixing your system.

Email habbb support and ask to cancel — there is no cancellation form to fight with and no retention call. We confirm the cancellation in writing, agree a date, revoke our remote access on that date, and deliver a handover pack that documents your configuration so you can self-manage or move to another provider. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing month; we do not pro-rate partial months.

Your Home Assistant keeps running on your hardware, with your configuration and your automations exactly as they were the moment we revoked access. We delete our administrative credentials from your hub, remove the secure tunnel, and stop running backups. Existing backups in S3 are deleted within 30 days of cancellation by default, or sooner on request. There is no data of yours that we retain beyond what is needed for invoicing records.

No. There is no cancellation fee, no exit fee and no clawback on the hardware kit. The kit, if you bought one, remains yours — you keep the Raspberry Pi, the SSD, the case and the PSU. The subscription simply ends at the close of the current billing month and you are not charged again.

Yes. If you are going abroad for an extended period, moving house, or just want to take a break, you can pause the subscription rather than cancel outright. Paused accounts retain their backups, their tunnel configuration and their place in the support queue, and reactivation is a single message to support. There is no reactivation fee. If you pause for longer than three months we may ask for a quick re-onboarding call to catch the hub up on missed updates.