Every company tells you why they're great. We're going to tell you where we fall short. Because you deserve to know exactly what you're getting into before you trust us with your home.
Haven is built on a set of beliefs we're not willing to compromise on: your data stays in your house, no subscriptions are required for core functionality, and no company should have a permanent window into your home. Those are good beliefs. We stand by them.
But beliefs have consequences. Every decision that makes Haven more private, more local, and more independent also makes it less convenient in ways you should understand before you sign up. Here's every single one, laid out honestly, with what we're doing about each of them.
This is the big one. Out of the box, Haven runs on your local network. That means when you're home, everything works perfectly. But the moment you walk out your front door and connect to cellular or a coffee shop Wi-Fi, you can't reach your Haven server.
With Google, Apple, or Ring, you open the app anywhere on Earth and it just works. That's because your data lives on their servers, not yours. Haven's whole philosophy is keeping data in your house, which means your house has to be reachable from outside for remote access to work.
This is a real limitation. If you're at work and want to check a camera, see where your kid is, or adjust your thermostat, you need remote access set up.
We can solve this. Haven Supporter ($5/mo) and Haven ($10–15/mo) subscriptions include managed remote access through Nabu Casa's encrypted relay — no ports to open, no configuration, it just works from anywhere. For technical users, we also support WireGuard VPN, Cloudflare Tunnel, and reverse proxy setups at no cost. But here's the honest nuance: the Nabu Casa relay means your commands pass through an external server (encrypted, but external). The VPN approach keeps everything truly local but requires more setup. This is the tradeoff that comes up again and again with Haven. We can make it more convenient, but convenience usually means involving someone else's infrastructure. We give you the options and let you decide where your line is.
Cloud services run on redundant servers in data centers with backup power, failover systems, and teams of engineers. Your Haven server runs on a mini PC in your closet. If it loses power, freezes, or the hard drive fails, your automations stop, your cameras stop recording, and your dashboard goes dark until you fix it.
Google Home doesn't go down because your router rebooted. Haven might.
Haven subscribers get automated backups and proactive monitoring. If your server goes offline, we know before you do and can help troubleshoot remotely. We also configure UPS battery backup during installation, set up automatic system recovery on power loss, and can configure redundant storage so a single drive failure doesn't take everything down. Your light switches and thermostats still work locally via Zigbee/Thread even if the server is down — they just lose their automations temporarily. It's not perfect, but it's resilient.
Google gives you a free account with 15GB of storage, free location tracking, and free basic smart home control. Haven requires you to buy a server, buy drives, buy cameras, buy sensors. Before you even turn it on, you might spend $300–600 on hardware alone.
We know that's a tough pill to swallow, especially compared to a Ring doorbell that's $50 on sale and "just works" the moment you plug it in.
The math works out in your favor over time. That Ring doorbell needs a $5–20/month subscription for recording. Google's "free" storage runs out fast and becomes $10/month. Over two to three years, Haven's upfront hardware cost is less than the subscriptions you'd be paying. We also do free consultations to right-size the hardware recommendation to your budget. You don't need a beefy server to run a few automations and a couple cameras. You can start small and grow.
Cloud-only devices are a dead end for Haven. If a smart device requires its manufacturer's server to function — and many do — Haven can't make it local. Some popular products fall into this category. Certain robot vacuums, some smart locks, a few doorbell cameras. If the manufacturer didn't build a local API or support Matter, the device is useless without their cloud.
Haven can also feel rougher around the edges than a polished Apple or Google experience. Home Assistant is incredibly powerful, but it's open source software maintained by a community, not a trillion-dollar corporation. Sometimes an update breaks something. Sometimes a Zigbee device takes a minute to pair. It's not always as seamless as tapping "set up" in the Google Home app.
During your consultation, we identify every device you already own and tell you honestly which ones will work with Haven and which ones won't. No surprises after installation. We also maintain a recommended hardware list of devices we've personally tested and trust. The ecosystem is growing fast — Matter is bringing more and more devices into the local-first world every month. And for Haven subscribers, we handle updates and troubleshooting, so you don't have to be the one figuring out why your motion sensor stopped responding at 2 AM.
SimpliSafe, ADT, and Ring all offer plans where a human being watches your alarm and calls the cops if something goes wrong. Haven doesn't have that. If your Haven alarm triggers at 3 AM, it sends you a notification. That's it. You decide what to do next.
For some people, this is a dealbreaker. If you want someone else to handle the emergency response, Haven isn't a complete replacement for a traditional security system.
Haven Watch's local AI gives you dramatically better information than a traditional motion alert. Instead of a blurry thumbnail, you get a plain-English description of exactly what happened. You can make a faster, more informed decision about whether to call 911 yourself. We also support automation chains: if a person is detected and your alarm is armed, Haven can flash every light in the house, activate a siren, send you live camera feeds, and record everything. For families that do want professional monitoring, Haven can coexist alongside a traditional alarm system. They're not mutually exclusive.
Google employs 180,000 people. Amazon has multiple redundant data centers on every continent. Haven is a small, independent operation. We don't have a call center. We don't have a billion-dollar infrastructure budget. If you need help at midnight on a Saturday, our response time is not going to compete with a company that has thousands of support agents.
There's also the question of longevity. Big companies can (and do) kill products without warning, but they're less likely to simply disappear. A small company could.
Everything Haven runs on is open source. Home Assistant, Immich, Frigate, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Meshtastic — none of it is proprietary to Haven. If we disappeared tomorrow, your entire system keeps running. There's no server to sunset, no subscription to cancel, no firmware update that bricks your hardware. You'd lose our support and managed services, but you'd keep everything else. That's by design. We built Haven on top of community-maintained software specifically so that our existence is a convenience, not a dependency.
You can set up Haven for your whole household, but privacy is a family decision. If your partner prefers Google Maps and doesn't want to use the Home Assistant companion app, Haven Locate doesn't work for them. If your teenager wants Snapchat and Instagram on a phone you've locked down, you're going to have a conversation that technology can't solve.
Haven gives you the tools. It can't give you the buy-in. And a smart home where half the family is working around the system is worse than no smart home at all.
We've designed Haven to be invisible when it's working well. Automations happen silently. The dashboard is optional. Lights still have switches. The phone companion runs in the background. The less your family has to think about Haven, the more likely they are to accept it. For privacy-skeptical family members, we find that framing it around what they gain (no ads, faster devices, no subscription fees) works better than what they lose. But honestly? This is the hardest problem Haven faces, and no amount of software solves a human disagreement.
Google has trained their AI models on billions of images, videos, and sensor readings from millions of homes. Haven's local AI runs smaller, open-source models on your home hardware. It's good — genuinely good at person detection, basic object recognition, and event description — but it's not going to match Google's ability to tell you "your friend Sarah is at the door" from a face it's never seen before by cross-referencing your contacts.
Local AI also requires decent hardware. If your Haven server is an older mini PC, AI features will be slower or limited to basic detection.
Open-source AI is improving at a staggering pace. Models that required a data center two years ago now run on a $200 mini PC. Haven's AI gets better with every update, and because it's modular, you can upgrade your hardware as models improve without replacing your whole system. We also support Coral TPU accelerators that add hardware AI processing for under $30. The gap is real today, but it's closing fast, and it's closing without anyone scanning your life to train their product.
When your photos live on iCloud, Apple handles redundancy across multiple data centers. When your photos live on a hard drive in your closet, you're one failed drive away from losing everything. Local storage is private, but it's also fragile if you don't plan for failure.
Here's the honest tension: we can absolutely solve this. Haven can do encrypted offsite backups, cloud storage through privacy-respecting providers, automated redundancy to a family member's Haven server across town. The technology is there and we'll set it up for you.
But every one of those solutions means a copy of your data leaves your house. Encrypted, yes. Sent to a provider you choose, yes. But no longer purely local, purely private, purely under your roof. For some people, that encrypted offsite backup is the obvious right answer and they won't think twice. For others, the whole reason they came to Haven was to keep everything in one place they control, and sending anything anywhere defeats the purpose.
This is the fundamental fork that runs through all of Haven: the most private version of anything is the local-only version, and the most resilient version involves trusting someone else with a copy. We can't make that decision for you. We can only make sure you understand the tradeoff and give you the tools to go either direction.
Every Haven installation starts with a backup strategy conversation. At minimum, we set up mirrored drives so a single failure doesn't lose data. From there, you choose your comfort level: a second drive you rotate offsite yourself (fully private, fully manual), automatic encrypted backups to another Haven server on a family member's network (private, automated, requires a second setup), or encrypted cloud backup to a provider like Backblaze B2 or a Proton-based solution (convenient, automated, but a copy exists outside your home). We configure whichever path you pick and automate it so you never have to think about it. The important thing is that you choose, not us.
After reading all of that, you might be wondering why anyone would pick the harder path. More expensive upfront, less convenient remotely, less polished in places, no safety net of a giant corporation behind it.
Here's the thing you'll notice if you read every catch carefully: almost all of them can be solved. Remote access, backups, cloud storage, offsite redundancy — we have tools for every one of these problems. The catches aren't technical limitations. They're philosophical ones. Every solution that makes Haven more convenient involves trusting someone else with a little piece of your data. For some people, encrypted cloud backups and a managed remote relay are perfectly acceptable. For others, the entire point is keeping it all in one place.
Haven doesn't decide for you. It gives you the spectrum and lets you plant your flag wherever you're comfortable. Fully local and fully manual on one end. Encrypted, relay-assisted, and mostly private on the other. Both are valid. Both work. The only wrong answer is not knowing which one you picked.
The cloud alternative doesn't have this conversation with you at all. You don't choose where your data goes — they already decided. You're paying with every photo Google scans, every conversation Alexa records, every location Life360 sells, every camera feed Ring hands to police. You just don't see the invoice.
Haven costs more in money and effort. The cloud costs more in everything else. We think the trade is worth it. But we respect you enough to let you decide that for yourself, with all the information, not just the marketing.
If you've read this whole page and you're still here, you're exactly who Haven is for.
Book a free consultation. We'll be just as honest about your specific situation as we've been on this page. If Haven isn't right for you, we'll tell you that too.
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