Open Home Foundation factsheet

Your home is a sanctuary: a place of refuge free from prying eyes, where you can be yourself without compromising your data, ideals, or independence.

To ensure technology respects this space, the Open Home Foundation fights for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes, and for every person who lives in one.

Our principles

• Privacy — Control your data and share only what you want. True privacy requires smart home devices to work locally, with cloud services opt-in only.
• Choice — Mix and match devices across manufacturers without vendor lock-in. This requires devices and their data to operate via open standards and local APIs.
• Sustainability — Repurpose your hardware and reduce waste. This requires durable devices open to modification, backed by tools that optimize energy.

Our work

The Open Home Foundation owns and governs more than 250 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries: including Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant. By protecting them under a non-profit structure, we ensure they remain independent, secure, and community-driven for decades to come, no matter what changes in the commercial tech market.

"I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: that we're driven by a higher goal than money, and that we are not for sale."

— Paulus Schoutsen, Open Home Foundation President

Our community

We're powered by a passionate global community of developers, creators, and users who refuse to let Big Tech dictate how their homes operate.

• Collaborative: Thousands of people working around the world to develop and maintain the ecosystem.
• Rapid: This massive scale ensures our projects evolve quickly to meet real-world needs.
• Transparent: Built in the open, users have visibility and control over how their technology works.

This collective ownership ensures the future of the smart home belongs to the people who live in them, not corporations seeking to control them.

Our funding and partners

The Open Home Foundation is funded by commercial partner fees and donations.

Funding flows in a single direction: from partners and donors to the foundation. Commercial partners have no ownership or financial control over the foundation. Instead, they are contractually required to contribute a majority of their profits from selling licensed Open Home Foundation products (such as Home Assistant and the ESPHome Starter Kit) to the foundation. This revenue funds salaried staff working globally on core projects, supports external open source collaborations, and powers community initiatives.

The Open Home Foundation at a glance

• Launched: 2024
• Legal structure: Tax-exempt, non-profit Stiftung (foundation)
• Headquarters: Switzerland
• Projects governed: 250+ open-source projects, standards, drivers, and libraries (including Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Music Assistant)
• Active users: 2.28+ million households worldwide, with Home Assistant installations growing 28% year-over-year in 2025
• Operational scale: 50+ full-time salaried employees globally
• Commercial partners: Nabu Casa, Apollo Automation
• Board members: Paulus Schoutsen (President), Pascal Vizeli (Treasurer), J. Nick Koston (Member), Trevor Schirmer (Rotating Partner Member)