Home Assistant acts as a “hub”, allowing you to collect data (and act on it) from multiple different sources. What makes Home Assistant so special is that it allows you to break out of the walled gardens of vendors (Philips, Aqara, SmartThings, Wyze, etc…). If you’re not aware, Home Assistant, is a home automation tool (e.g., turn on the lights when I get home, if the living room is above 75 F turn on the A/C, etc…). Even if I’m not logging into the application itself on a consistent basis, Home Assistant is always there, running in the background, automating my life. I’m certainly not a Home Assistant power user, but I will say this is one of the most useful applications that I self-host. However, when trying to sell “regular people” on self-hosted, open-source applications, this is the list to start with. I’m aware that this is not an exhaustive list, and that most of these applications stand on the shoulders of giants. This got me thinking about other self-hosted, open-source applications that are truly amazing works of engineering and community collaboration.

The next day (after having the tank fixed), I purchased a water leak sensor, added it to Home Assistant in under 2 minutes, and was able to get push notifications of future detected leaks. My hot water tank recently leaked, but (luckily for me) there was a floor drain right next to it. In my opinion, these self-hosted, open-source applications are the best of what open-source can be.

Home assistant plex