Budget-Friendly Strategies for Creating Your Own Intelligent House

Key Takeaways

• Smart home subscriptions add up quickly, but there are low-cost alternatives and clever workarounds that can keep costs from getting out of hand.
• Home Assistant is a completely free alternative to mainstream smart home ecosystems that lets you use smart home devices from different ecosystems together.
• Prioritize the smart features that matter most to you, or even just start with one “smart room” to avoid overspending.

When so many smart home devices come with a subscription fee, the ongoing costs can quickly add up. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A convenient yet affordable smart home might be closer than you think.

Watch Out for Excessive Smart Home Subscriptions

Every smart home subscription plays a role in making your house a convenient place to live. Undoubtedly, each subscription is worth it on its own, but it’s when you’re juggling more than a handful of subscriptions that the situation can start to feel excessive. It’s easy to lose track once they start piling up, and the monthly cost can eventually cancel out the convenience factor.

Lucas Gouveia / Justin Duino / How-To Geek | Michael Traitov / Shutterstock

The first step in achieving affordable smart home convenience is taking stock of everything you’re paying for. This is important because it can be so easy to forget some of your monthly expenses, especially when you also have multiple streaming service subscriptions to consider or free trials you forgot to cancel. It’s also easy to become so accustomed to having certain smart devices that it slips your mind that you’re even paying for them.

Some of the most common smart home subscriptions include:

• Home monitoring systems (Ring, SimpliSafe)
• Home gym equipment (Peloton, NordicTrack)
• Smart garage features (MyQ, Tailwind)
• Smart beds (Sleep Number, Saatva)
• Kitchen devices (Anova, Samsung Food)

On top of these, you might also have an Amazon Prime or Nest Aware subscription that helps you get the most out of your smart home hub devices . If you have several smart home-related subscriptions or are considering investing, take a moment to consider if you might be exceeding your budget in the long run. You likely have options to achieve a similar level of convenience for less.

The simplest tip is to create a quick spreadsheet that lists all of your subscriptions, add everything up, and see what you can afford to live without. Play with the numbers until you reach a monthly outgoing cost that doesn’t feel too excessive. Remember: you can always resubscribe if you feel like you’re missing out.

Balance Convenience With Cost

The goal of building a smart home might be the cool factor, added security, or simple convenience. You don’t necessarily need the priciest options to achieve any of those goals. If you are building a smart ecosystem for the first time, or simply making an addition to your current environment, one way to balance convenience with costs is to consider affordable smart devices that offer similar functionality to the top-shelf brands.

For example, the Wyze Bulb is an inexpensive alternative to the popular Philips Hue smart light system. While some smart home owners shy away from Wyze smart cameras for their history of security flaws , the Wyze Bulb is a solid option for achieving a low-cost lighting system that you can control and adjust with other smart devices.

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Even some of the most advanced smart home features can be yours with no monthly fee. A Simplisafe home security system will run you less than a similar Ring alarm system and still includes sensors, cameras, a carbon monoxide detector and more, all without a subscription.

Some other ways you can cut or replace certain smart home subscriptions without losing convenience include:

• Replacing your cloud storage services with smart devices that have onboard storage.
• Passing on smart plugs in favor of mechanical outlet timers that still help you save energy.
• Replacing your smart coffee maker with a programmable machine that doesn’t require IoT integration.
• Cutting your smart gym equipment subscription once you’ve established a repeatable routine.

Consider cutting back on the scale of your smart home and start with a smart room instead. Think about which room of the house you use most and turn it into the hub for your smart ecosystem. If the time comes to add more smart tech later, you can efficiently and thoughtfully scale out from that central location.

You can likely optimize the cost-to-value balance of your smart home by prioritizing just one or two subscriptions. Platforms like Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings comprise entire smart ecosystems . Whichever platform you use to automate your home, the subscriptions that enable your platform of choice might be the only smart home subscriptions worth keeping.

Try Home Assistant Instead

There is definitely something to be said for all the first-party subscription services that simply work with the most popular smart devices. However, many people are turning to Home Assistant instead, a free open-source home automation solution that works independently of systems from Amazon, Apple, and Google.

In exchange for a bit of extra effort upfront, you can set up Home Assistant to achieve smart home convenience without the need for several fragmented smart home subscriptions.

The best part is that Home Assistant works with almost any smart device. This means you can do cool things with Home Assistant like automate your lighting systems, replace costly home security services, or integrate multiple different voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. It’s easy to get started with a basic Raspberry Pi kit .

You can even stream music with Home Assistant to any smart speaker you own. Integrate a Spotify Premium account, set up a Plex Media Server , or link any other compatible music provider to fully control how you listen to music in your home. Take it one step further and create speaker groups in the Home Assistant software to extend the listening experience across different rooms or even to outdoor speakers.

Home Assistant also happens to work offline, which means you’ll still be able to run automations and interact with your devices even if the internet goes down.

Understand Which Features Are Worth It for You

Having a full-fledged smart home isn’t necessarily worth it for everyone, at least not until some of the technology becomes ubiquitous to the point of widespread affordability. For some potential smart home adopters, the idea of subscription fees might be more bearable if many services could be bundled into one reasonable monthly payment rather than several pricey transactions.

It is important to identify which features are actually worth it for you. You might consider security to be a top priority, for example, but maybe you don’t need a comprehensive monitoring system complete with alarms and cameras. Depending on your neighborhood, a smart lock can be enough to keep intruders out and track when people are entering or leaving your home (and it could save you money if you ever get locked out ).

Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

Building a smart home is all about creating an environment that improves how you and your family live. Every device, subscription, and service you invest in should have a practical or fun purpose that suits you. Buying smart home products purely for their popularity or cool factor is a fast track to overspending.

If you focus on the features that matter most to you, and take the time to explore traditional alternatives , then you can build a convenient smart home without breaking the bank.

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