Samsung's $4.99 SmartThings fee follows you to Home Assistant

Published Sep 14, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Shivansh began his tech journey as an avid reader of tech publications, which inspired him to launch his career in video media at Sillycorns. He has led content across multiple tech YouTube channels and Instagram accounts, crafted go-to-market (GTM) strategies for Vivo, and consulted on digital growth. Coming full circle to his roots in written media, he now delivers deep-dive tech journalism. Outside of his professional work, Shivansh loves watching movies, riding bikes, and playing cricket. For about a month now, a smart plug and a starter hub have been sitting in my browser tab. The plan was to control a lamp, monitor two doors, and keep everything running while I’m away. I chose Home Assistant for it, and then Samsung said it would start charging $4.99 a month for the SmartThings API. This fee is to begin in October, so I started finding workarounds. I traced how a command actually gets from a dashboard to a lamp. It turns outmany smart home problems need a different solution than we think. And if you are a smart home enthusiast like me, you need to know this. Let's begin. Your light switch mails a letter to Samsung's servers And Samsung has decided to charge postage Home Assistant tags every integration with something it calls an IoT class. The SmartThings one is marked Cloud Push, and this label is the whole story. Consider that your dashboard is in your living room and your lamp is eight feet away. Now, when you tap the button, the instructions leave your house and go to Samsung's servers. From there, it updates the exact command for your lamp and comes back to your dashboard. For years, that letter traveled free. On June 23, Samsung announced it is moving the SmartThings API to paid tiers, including a $4.99 monthly personal plan for individual developers. Free access runs through the end of September. From October, the postage is yours. That works out to about $60 a year to send letters between devices inside your own house. The fee is not charged for the SmartThings app. It is for programmatic access that talks to Samsung's servers for you. The mailbox key used to last 50 years, and now it expires overnight Read the screenshot; it's not a typo Before any of this, a Personal Access Token was the easy way in. You generated one, pasted it into whatever you were building, and it worked. Samsung's own authorization docs still record what happened next. A token created before December 30, 2024, could be set to last up to 50 years. A token created after that date is valid for 24 hours. Fifty years to one day, on the same page, one sentence apart. I read it twice because the numbers look like a typo. They are not. Anyone running a home-brewed script after that date had to re-key it every morning or rebuild around OAuth. Most people quietly stopped. So October is the last bolt on a door that started closing eighteen months ago. Samsung's developer terms, meanwhile, have always said the company can revise them at any time without notice. Nobody reads the back of the envelope. Which left the only question that mattered to my cart, and we are at it now. How to tell if a smart home device needs Samsung's cloud before you buy it The check takes a minute, and it is free Every Home Assistant integration page carries its IoT class on a small card at the bottom. Local Push and Local Polling mean the traffic stays inside your house. Cloud Push and Cloud Polling mean it does not. So now, before I buy anything, I search for the brand on the Home Assistant integrations page and scroll to that line. That is the whole test. SmartThings reads Cloud Push. Zigbee Home Automation reads Local Push. Those two words separate a device that keeps working when your internet drops from one that stops. The scale caught me off guard. That same card puts the SmartThings integration at 10.2% of active installations that report usage, about one in ten. Reporting is opt-in, so the true figure sits higher. It is not about owning, though, but renting. Samsung's rate limit page caps the Device APIs at 12 requests per minute per device. Open home-assistant.io/integrations, search for the brand, and scroll to the card at the bottom of its page. Local means your commands stay home. Cloud means they take a trip. Zigbee and Z-Wave devices skip Samsung's servers entirely, and a $30 Zigbee dongle is all you need to host that network yourself. At $4.99 a month, the Zigbee dongle pays for itself This could make your shopping list easy. So I already own a Samsung fridge, a Samsung washer, and a Samsung TV. Sadly, none of the above rescues me in this case. Matter was supposed to be the fix. In practice, Samsung's Matter-capable appliances cannot be commissioned into Home Assistant directly. SmartThings stays with the Matter controller, which keeps Samsung's cloud as the only road in. The fridge is not going to learn a second language. The community is having a go at it. A custom integration called LocalThings reaches newer Samsung appliances over your own network with no cloud round trip. It works, and it wants firmware from roughly 2022 or later. Its own documentation admits the appliance keeps talking to Samsung anyway, because that is firmware behavior with no integration controls. Leaving is not free either. You cannot reuse the radios inside a SmartThings hub. Every Zigbee device has to be factory reset and paired again, one at a time, and every Z-Wave device excluded, then included. At 30 devices, that is your weekend. What you own Can it leave What it costs you Zigbee sensors and bulbs Yes A USB coordinator, plus a factory reset and re-pair for each device Z-Wave locks and switches Yes A USB coordinator, plus an exclude and include for each device Matter devices from other brands Yes A share code from the SmartThings app, no reset needed Samsung fridge, washer, or TV Not really $4.99 a month, or a community integration and 2022 firmware Measured against a weekend of resets, $4.99 a month is a fair trade for plenty of people, and I would take it because of those Samsung appliances I already have in my house. People never really own cloud-powered products Paulus Schoutsen, who founded Home Assistant, called this yet another cloud paywall, filing it under a running series about how people never really own cloud-powered products. Nobody's device stopped working here. The road it travels grew a tollbooth, and that road was never printed on the box.