What's the catch?
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 beliefs we won't compromise on: your data stays in your house, no subscription is required for core functionality, and no company should have a permanent window into your home. But beliefs have consequences. Every decision that makes Haven more private also makes it less convenient in ways you should understand. Here's every single one.
01 No remote access without a subscription or technical setup.
This is the big one. Out of the box, Haven runs on your local network. When you're home, everything works perfectly. But the moment you walk out your front door and connect to cellular or 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.
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.
Haven subscribers get managed remote access through Nabu Casa's encrypted relay. No ports to open, no configuration. For technical users, we also support WireGuard VPN, Cloudflare Tunnel, and reverse proxy setups at no cost. The Nabu Casa relay means your commands pass through an external server (encrypted, but external). You choose your comfort level: managed relay for convenience, or VPN for full local control with more setup.
02 If your hardware dies, your smart home goes down.
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 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.
03 The upfront cost is higher than "free" cloud stuff.
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, drives, cameras, sensors. Before you even turn it on, you might spend $300–600 on hardware alone.
That's a tough pill compared to a Ring doorbell that's $50 on sale and "just works" the moment you plug it in.
The math works out 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 to your budget. You don't need a beefy server to run a few automations and a couple cameras. Start small, grow later.
04 Some devices just won't work.
Cloud-only devices are a dead end for Haven. If a smart device requires its manufacturer's server to function, 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. 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.
During consultation, we identify every device you own and tell you honestly which ones work and which don't. No surprises after installation. We maintain a recommended hardware list of devices we've personally tested. The ecosystem is growing fast — Matter is bringing more devices into the local-first world every month. For subscribers, we handle updates and troubleshooting so you don't have to figure out why your motion sensor stopped at 2 AM.
05 No professional monitoring. No one dispatches police for you.
SimpliSafe, ADT, and Ring all offer plans where a human watches your alarm and calls the cops if something goes wrong. Haven doesn't have that. If your alarm triggers at 3 AM, it sends you a notification. You decide what to do next.
For some people, this is a dealbreaker. If you want someone else to handle 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 what happened. You can make a faster decision about whether to call 911. We also support automation chains: if a person is detected and your alarm is armed, Haven can flash every light, activate a siren, send live camera feeds, and record everything. For families that want professional monitoring, Haven can coexist alongside a traditional alarm system. They're not mutually exclusive.
06 You're trusting a small company. Not a giant one.
Google employs 180,000 people. Amazon has redundant data centers on every continent. Haven is a small, independent operation. We don't have a call center or a billion-dollar infrastructure budget. If you need help at midnight on a Saturday, our response time won't compete with a company that has thousands of support agents.
There's also longevity. Big companies can 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 community-maintained software specifically so that our existence is a convenience, not a dependency.
07 Your family has to actually be on board.
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 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 thinks about Haven, the more likely they are to accept it. For privacy-skeptical family members, framing it around what they gain (no ads, faster devices, no subscription fees) works better than what they lose. But this is the hardest problem Haven faces, and no amount of software solves a human disagreement.
08 The AI isn't as smart as Google's. Yet.
Google has trained their AI on billions of images 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, 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.
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 the 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.
09 True local-only means you're the backup plan.
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 fragile if you don't plan for failure.
Haven absolutely can do offsite backups, encrypted cloud storage, and cross-server redundancy. The technology is there. But every one of those solutions means a copy of your data leaves your house. Some people won't blink. Others came to Haven specifically to avoid that.
Every installation includes a backup strategy conversation. There are three tiers: manual drive rotation (fully local, you physically move a drive offsite), Haven-to-Haven server sync (encrypted between two Haven installations, like a family member's), or encrypted cloud backup to a privacy-respecting provider. You pick your comfort level. At minimum, we set up mirrored drives so a single failure doesn't lose data. The backup runs automatically. You don't have to think about it. But it's one more thing that exists in your house, and it requires you to take it seriously.
So why would anyone choose this?
After reading all of that, you might wonder why anyone picks the harder path. More expensive upfront, less convenient remotely, less polished in places, no safety net of a giant corporation.
Because the convenient path isn't free either. You're paying with every photo Google scans, every conversation Alexa records, every location Life360 sells, every camera feed Ring hands to police, every click that trains a model you don't benefit from. You just don't see the invoice.
The catches on this page aren't technical limitations. They're philosophical ones. Almost every problem has a solution, and almost every solution involves trusting someone else with a piece of your data. Haven gives you the full spectrum and lets you plant your flag wherever you're comfortable. We'll meet you where you are.
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.
Where the money goes.
At least a dollar from every active subscription goes to digital rights organizations every month. We donate up to 10% of subscription revenue to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nabu Casa, Mozilla Foundation, and Freedom of the Press Foundation. Want to direct your share to a specific org? Just tell us. We'll also pass along links if you'd rather donate directly. Quarterly donation receipts will be published here.
Still here? Good.
If you've read this whole page and you're still interested, you're exactly who Haven is for. Tell us what you want to protect.