The Dutch company Athom announces that its popular platform for smart home devices, Homey, is now free. You can connect up to five smart devices in the app. In addition, there is the new Homey Bridge, a cheaper smarthome hub.
Homey now (limited) free
Homey is a Dutch platform that connects smart products in one app, similar to Google Home, but also different. It puts forward some trump cards in the form of special functions. With Homey Energy you can use your smart thermostat to compile a report of your energy consumption directly in the app. Furthermore, Homey Insights shows figures and graphs about the use of your smart home devices, and with Homey Insights you can automate tasks of the devices.
Everyone can now connect up to five devices for free in the Homey app, Athom announces in a press release. If they can make a Wi-Fi connection on their own, then a smarthome hub is no longer required either. Think of Philips Hue lamps that connect to the Hue bridge themselves or devices that work directly with the cloud. If you exceed the limit of five devices in Homey, you will have to pay 2.99 euros per month for the new Premium subscription. This makes the number of devices that you can connect unlimited.
Homey Bridge
But how does Homey bring together devices that connect using methods other than Wi-Fi? For this, Homey has proposed the Bridge, which is an inexpensive smart home hub that works with the protocols; ZigBee, Z-Wave, bluetooth, 433Mhz and wifi. You can buy it for 69 euros and for that price it can connect different types of devices with the Homey app. At least if you do not go beyond the limit of five devices, because then that premium subscription is required.
And what about the Homey Pro?
Homey had previously marketed smarthome hubs: the Homey Homey 2 and Homey Pro. Users of those hubs do not need to subscribe to a Premium subscription. They automatically come with the necessary processing power and storage to control smart devices, while the Bridge processes everything via cloud servers. If you use the new Homey Bridge with the premium subscription, you get almost the same possibilities as users of the Homey Pro hub, only nothing is processed locally and only via the cloud.
There are also a number of small advantages of Homey Pro. You get access to experimental functions, and you can develop your own applications for Homey with the HomeyScript platform. The Homey Pro hub will continue to receive updates. If you want to test the new free Homey platform, you can register for the beta version from now on. Which can through this way.
Are you going to test the possibilities of Homey by connecting your devices for free? Are you convinced that Homey has become more accessible? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.
– Thanks for information from Androidworld.