Home Assistant Managed Service for the US: What We Do, Who It's For

If you run short-term rentals on Airbnb or Vrbo, or you manage a handful of properties on owners' behalf, you've probably already arrived at Home Assistant the hard way. You started with a smart lock at one house. Then a thermostat. Then a noise sensor after a neighbor complained. Six months later you have four vendor apps per property, a spreadsheet of door codes, and a recurring 2 a.m. message from a guest who can't get the heat to come on. habbb is a managed Home Assistant service for the people on the other end of those messages: hosts and small property managers who need the platform to be reliable but don't want to become Home Assistant administrators to make it so.

Why this is a real category in 2026

Three things converged this year. Home Assistant itself has matured into a genuinely production-grade platform — Matter support is real, the energy dashboard is good, and the integration library covers almost every device a US host would actually buy. At the same time, STR margins have tightened: cleaning costs are up, occupancy in many markets is flat, and platform fees keep climbing. Hosts who used to tolerate paying for five separate vendor subscriptions per property are looking for a single layer that stitches the locks, thermostats, noise sensors and leak detectors into one system they can actually run.

The third thing is that multi-property operators are tired of vendor sprawl. Schlage's app, Ecobee's app, Sense's app, Minut's app, Lutron's app — every one of them is fine for a homeowner with one house, and miserable when you're flicking between five properties before breakfast. Home Assistant collapses all of it into a single dashboard with a single login. The catch, as everyone who's tried to self-host it discovers, is that running Home Assistant is a job in itself.

That's the gap habbb fills.

What "managed" means concretely

We are launching the US service in beta on May 9, 2026. We've been running Home Assistant ourselves for years, we already manage UK customers on the same model, and we're now opening Bring-Your-Own-HA support to US hosts and small property managers. You keep your existing Home Assistant install — on whatever hardware you already chose — and we take over the operational layer behind it.

Specifically, the $60/month subscription covers:

• Secure remote access, set up through a Cloudflare tunnel that runs as a container alongside your Home Assistant install. No port forwarding, no exposing your home network, and it works behind CGNAT (which a lot of US ISPs quietly use).
• Daily off-site backups, stored encrypted in our cloud, retained on a rolling schedule. If your hardware dies, your configuration doesn't die with it.
• Managed updates — we test new Home Assistant releases before they land on your system, and roll back if anything breaks. Home Assistant ships a new core release roughly once a month, and not all of them are safe.
• 24/7 health monitoring. If your hub goes offline, we know within minutes. If a critical integration stops reporting, we notice. You don't.
• Fixes and tweaks to the automations you already have. If the check-in unlock automation stops firing, or your noise sensor stops reporting, we sort it out.
• Hands-on support by email when you need a human.

This is a maintenance contract. It is not an unlimited developer on retainer.

Who this is for

We've been deliberately narrow about who we think this is a fit for, because the wrong customer is unhappy on both sides.

Good fit:

• STR hosts running 1-10 properties on Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com. Especially if you have smart locks, thermostats and noise sensors and you've already tried to wire them together yourself.
• Small property managers running 5-50 short-term or vacation rentals on owners' behalf, who want a single tech stack across the portfolio rather than whatever the original owner happened to install.
• Owner-operators with a few units who've already adopted Home Assistant, hit the maintenance wall, and want the operational layer handled by someone else.

Not a fit:

• A homeowner with one property and no rental angle. Honestly, you're better off self-hosting. The maintenance overhead at one house is low enough that it doesn't justify the subscription, and there are good free YouTube guides for everything you'd want to do.
• People looking for monitored security. This is a different category from a Vivint-style monitored security contract. We're not a security company; we don't have a 24/7 alarm-response center; we don't dispatch police.
• Real estate agents. You sell houses, you don't manage rentals. We can't help you list inventory and we have no role in transactions.

What habbb adds that your current setup doesn't

Most hosts we talk to already have Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi or an old mini-PC in a closet somewhere. It mostly works. The question is what falls over when you stop paying close attention to it.

Remote access without the awkward bits. Most self-hosted setups either (a) expose Home Assistant to the public internet, which is a bad idea, (b) rely on a VPN that's fine for the host but unworkable for a co-host or cleaner who needs occasional access, or (c) use a remote-access subscription that gets you in but doesn't do anything else. Our tunnel uses Cloudflare Access in front of it, so we can scope who gets in and revoke them when staff change.

Backups you don't have to remember. Home Assistant's own documentation tells you, in plain English, not to store backups on the same device that Home Assistant runs on. A surprising number of people store backups on the same device that Home Assistant runs on. We send them off the device, automatically, every day.

Tested updates. Home Assistant ships a major core release roughly monthly, and a few of them per year are bumpy. The community forums fill up with breakage reports within hours. Customers on the managed plan don't see those releases until we've validated them.

Monitoring with real teeth. If your check-in automation silently stops firing because an integration's auth token expired, you find out when the guest texts you. We find out when the integration goes amber on the dashboard.

What's out of scope

Three things specifically, which we want to be honest about up front.

One-off automation projects are quoted separately. If you want a brand new check-in flow built from scratch — guest arrives within a window, lock unlocks at the booking start time, thermostat raises to 70°F, lights come on at sunset, lock auto-relocks at checkout — that's a project. We quote those separately, scope them properly, and build them once. The monthly subscription doesn't include unlimited custom development. The boundary is what keeps the price honest.

Regulatory compliance is the host's responsibility. Some US cities have tightened STR rules in the last few years (NYC's Local Law 18, parts of California, several Florida municipalities, and a long tail of others). habbb's job is the smart-home tech layer. We're not your STR licensing consultant, and we don't promise that any specific automation satisfies any specific local ordinance. If your local rules require, say, decibel-only noise monitoring without recording audio, products like Minut are designed for exactly that — but the responsibility for picking the right product and following local law sits with you.

Hardware sales and shipping are UK-only for now. habbb's pre-built hardware kit ships from the UK and uses a UK Type-G power supply. We can't sell it into the US right now. The BYOHA path is the supported US route. Bring whatever Home Assistant install you already have.

What hardware you already have is fine

We don't care what you're running, as long as it's Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Supervised on hardware that's healthy enough to keep going.

Common setups we already manage:

• A Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 5 with an SSD (please not an SD card — SD cards are the single biggest cause of dead Home Assistant installs).
• A mini-PC, NUC, or repurposed thin client running Home Assistant OS in a VM or on bare metal.
• A cloud VM running Home Assistant OS — uncommon for STR setups because you usually want local device access, but valid for some configurations.

For radios, if you have direct-Zigbee or Thread devices (Aqara sensors, raw Hue bulbs without the bridge, IKEA Tradfri, Matter-over-Thread devices), you'll want a Zigbee/Thread coordinator already plugged in. Most US hosts running Schlage Encode, Yale Assure, August, Ecobee, Nest or Honeywell T9 are operating over Wi-Fi or vendor cloud APIs and don't need a separate radio at all.

Smart-home stack we see most often in US STR setups, just so you can sanity-check yours:

• Locks: Schlage Encode, Yale Assure 2, August, Level Lock, Igloohome.
• Thermostats: Ecobee, Nest, Honeywell T9 (forced-air HVAC), Mysa (electric baseboard), Sensibo (ductless mini-split heads).
• Noise: Minut decibel sensors. Decibel-only, no audio recording — designed around the privacy concerns guests are reasonably going to have.
• Energy: Sense and Emporia Vue are the two we see most. IoTaWatt for the more technical owner-operators.
• Leak: Moen Flo, Phyn, plus the usual battery-powered Z-Wave and Zigbee leak sensors.

If something on this list is missing from your setup, that's fine — it's not a checklist for joining. It's just the lay of the land.

How onboarding works in practice

You email us. We send a short questionnaire — what hardware, what version of Home Assistant, what integrations you're already running, how many properties, where they are. We schedule a 30-minute call to walk through your setup over a screen-share. If we're a fit for each other, we'll send onboarding instructions: installing the Cloudflare tunnel container, granting us API access scoped to what we actually need, and pointing the backup target at our managed S3 bucket.

The whole thing typically takes a working week from first email to fully managed, longer if you have a complex multi-property setup. We do this with you, on a call, the first time. You don't need to figure it out yourself.

We also put a few standard guardrails in place: an admin user for habbb that's separate from yours (so you can revoke us in one click if you ever cancel), backup encryption keys you hold and we don't, and read-only access where read-only is good enough.

Pricing — $60/month + tax

$60/month for BYOHA, plus state sales tax added at checkout via Stripe Tax based on your billing address. No contract, cancel any time. Billed monthly via card.

It's worth saying why the BYOHA price is what it is. Every BYOHA setup is different — different hardware, different Home Assistant version, different integrations, different automations someone else wrote that we now have to understand and not break. There's a real onboarding cost on our side for each new property, and the monthly fee reflects ongoing operational responsibility for whatever's already in there. The all-in UK kit-plus-subscription bundle is cheaper because the kit is identical across customers and we already know its quirks. Yours, we're meeting for the first time.

If you cancel, you keep your hardware, you keep your Home Assistant install, you keep your data. We remove our admin user, hand back the tunnel configuration if you want it, and stop billing. Nothing of yours is held hostage.

FAQs

Is my Home Assistant setup compatible? If you're running Home Assistant OS or Supervised on healthy hardware, almost certainly yes. The exceptions are very old self-built Home Assistant Core installs and some heavily-customized Docker setups; we'll tell you on the onboarding call if yours is one of them.

What about data privacy? Your Home Assistant data lives on your hardware in your house. Backups are encrypted with a key you control and stored in our cloud. We hold an admin account on your Home Assistant for support purposes, scoped and revocable. We don't sell data, we don't train models on your home, and we don't share with third parties beyond the named subprocessors we use to run the service (currently AWS for backup storage and Cloudflare for the tunnel). US privacy law is a state-by-state patchwork — we'll honor CCPA, VCDPA and CPA data-subject requests on request.

What happens if you lose my data? Backups are stored with versioning, in a different region from your home, encrypted at rest. The realistic failure mode isn't us losing data; it's a backup never getting taken in the first place because nobody set it up. That's the failure mode we're built to prevent.

Can I cancel? Any time. No contract, no minimum term. Email us, we stop the next bill.

Do you fix bugs you didn't introduce? Generally yes — that's most of what the subscription is. If your existing motion-triggered light automation stops firing because an integration changed, we fix it. If you want a new motion-triggered light automation built from scratch, that's a small project we quote separately. There's a judgment call in the middle and we err toward "just sort it" for anything that takes us under an hour.

How does this differ from Nabu Casa Cloud? Different category. They sell remote access as a subscription. We sell a service contract that includes remote access alongside backups, monitoring, updates and human support.

Do I need to be technical? No. The whole point is that you don't. You need to be able to follow instructions on a screen-share for the onboarding hour, after which the system is ours to run.

What about new automations? Quoted separately. A simple new automation typically starts around $60. A new integration category — say, adding a noise-sensor system to a property that didn't have one before — typically starts around $100. We scope each one before starting and don't begin until you've agreed.

How to start

The US service is brand-new — we launched BYOHA on May 9, 2026 — and we're taking on customers one at a time so we get the onboarding right. If this sounds like what you've been looking for and you're a single-home or small operator, you can subscribe directly. State sales tax is added at checkout.

Subscribe — $60/month + tax

If you're managing more than five properties or want to talk through your setup before paying anything, drop us an email with a short description of your setup (hardware, number of properties, current pain point) and we'll come back to you within a working day.

The smart home for your rentals is entirely doable. It just needs somebody to look after it once it's running.