I still am not going to rent software like this. I get why you need MRR or something, but if that’s the case sell me the product-$30? $40?-after a brief trial, and promise a year? the next major version (or at least a year)? of upgrades.

Then don’t cause major versions casually, and charge a reasonable upgrade fee when more value is delivered with a major upgrade.

I get that you have expenses, and things like servers cost money-but you’re not providing the server here.

We’d love to make the app cheaper or even free — we are definitely not in this to get rich. We built something we personally love using, and we believe it’s a unique project: no one else is making native Home Assistant clients like this.

But we’re also a small group of independent developers, and it’s a pretty complex app. We’ve already spent over a year building it, and we can’t keep putting in time and money unless it at least pays for itself. We’re still figuring out whether there’s enough interest to support it long-term. If not… well, that tells us what we need to know.

Home Assistant isn’t exactly mainstream, so we’re not expecting millions of users. It’s simple math — either a small number of people pitch in a bit to keep it going, or the project dies.

I don’t know if 1.5 USD/month (or 3 USD for the family plan) is a big stretch — it’s about the cost of a cup of coffee. And if you work in tech and earn something like 50 USD/hour, that’s 3–4 minutes of your time. If the app saves you even that much effort each month, it’s probably worth it. If not — fair enough!