What a Home Assistant maintenance contract should cost (running the RMR numbers)
What should a Home Assistant maintenance contract cost? A €10 to €40 per month corridor derived from neighbouring trades, and the RMR maths behind it.
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Posts on Practice
Collected posts on Practice — from our practice running fleets of Home Assistant instances.
Practice · Guide
Practice · Guide
Make Home Assistant more reliable: get the switching logic out of the server
Make Home Assistant more reliable by wiring basic switching directly between devices: ESPHome on-chip automations, Zigbee binding, Z-Wave. HA stays the brain.
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Product · Walkthrough
HA Fleet Manager in four screenshots
A quick visual walk through HA Fleet Manager: the whole fleet at a glance, one installation in detail, remote updates, and warnings about risky versions. No long essay, just four pictures.
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Practice · Guide
Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN — and without an open port
Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN: no open port, no full-LAN access. Why both are wrong and what time-boxed, client-granted access looks like.
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Practice · Guide
Home Assistant fleet management: multi-tenant beats the DIY rig
Managing multiple Home Assistant instances for clients with remote_homeassistant, an MQTT bridge or a VPN hits a wall. Why fleet management is its own category.
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Market · Encouragement
A Home Assistant business: can you build a living on open source?
No vendor behind you, forever at the customer site, updates that wreck everything — the three big fears about going pro with Home Assistant. Why WordPress carried exactly the same fears and still spawned an entire service industry.
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Explainer · Tech
CGNAT and Home Assistant: why port forwarding no longer works
Behind Carrier-Grade NAT your public IPv4 is gone and port forwarding silently dies. How to spot CGNAT and still reach Home Assistant.
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Profession · Market
What does a Home Assistant integrator actually do? Job profile, tools, business models
In German-speaking Europe "Home Assistant integrator" is barely an established profession — and that is exactly the opportunity. Who looks after HA for a living, what they do day to day, the tools they reach for, how they get paid.
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Privacy · Argument
Why "local stays local" is the best sales argument an integrator has
Home Assistant ties together cameras, door locks, heating, presence data — sometimes medical devices. What the customer actually gets when the house isn't piped into the cloud, and why solo integrators have an argument here that big platforms structurally can't answer.
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Fiction · Story
Thursday, 14:32 — the Z2M cascade nobody was meant to hear
A fictional shift in the life of a solo integrator: three Z2M crashes after a silent add-on update, and the forty minutes between the first symptom and a quiet fix.
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