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!
Good question! We didn’t mean to hide the pricing. The reason we left it off originally is that app stores adjust prices by country, and we didn’t want to confuse people by listing just the US price or trying to maintain a huge list of 150+ regional prices. That said, we get that having a ballpark is better than nothing, so we’ve now added the US pricing to the site.
Appreciate the feedback—and you’re right, pricing should be easy to find. The reason we left it out initially was that app stores adjust the price by country, so listing one number could be misleading for a lot of users. That said, we hear you. We’ve added the US pricing to the site so people at least have a ballpark.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! We’re not trying to convince anyone to switch—Home Assistant’s app is powerful, no doubt, and we’ve got a ton of respect for what the team has built. Our focus is a bit different: we’re building a clean, elegant dashboard that’s easy for anyone in the household to use, not just the HA admin. We also offer a few things that aren’t available out of the box with HA, or that take more effort to set up. Think of it more as a complement than a replacement.
There are many non-standard things. Huge amount of animations, all of them are "user controllable". And they must be implemented not to interfere with user input.
Then the conversion itself. The goal is to type a number and one-two letters and get a relevant result. So there are many heuristics there. For example, 0.1 meter will be converted to 3.94 inches, 1 meter — to 3.28 ft and 10000 meters — to 6.21 miles. And there is much more of that.
At last we needed the app to work well on every device that is supported by iOS7. iPhone 4 is not a fast device by today standards. So optimization was a little bit challenging also.