308: Why 2 Million People Ditched Alexa & Google for This - Me Included

Most smart homes hand your house to Big Tech. Home Assistant is proof they don't have to.

Matt and Sean sit down with Paulus Schoutsen, the software engineer who started Home Assistant, the largest open-source smart home platform in the world, now running in over 2 million homes. It runs locally, it keeps your data inside your house, and it doesn't stop working the day a company decides to shut off its servers. We get into why Paulus gave the whole project away to a nonprofit instead of selling it, how the energy dashboard turns your solar and battery into something genuinely useful, and whether a normal person can actually run this or if it's still a power-user thing. So is the open, local smart home finally good enough to replace Alexa and Google? Or is handing your house to Big Tech still the path of least resistance?

Chapters:

00:00: Intro
01:20: Paulus Schoutsen
52:08: Feedback - Updates
56:20: Feedback - What Happens with the Chlorine?
59:24: Feedback - Climate Change
01:01:00: Feedback - Poutine

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPEtYL9F0Vk

Mentioned in this episode:

Home Assistant (free, open source): https://www.home-assistant.io/

Nabu Casa / Home Assistant Cloud (~$80/yr, funds the mission): https://www.nabucasa.com/

Open Home Foundation: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/

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YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@stilltbd

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Get in touch: https://stilltbd.fm/contact/

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