Starting in October, Samsung will charge $4.99 a month to individual developers and hobbyists who plug into SmartThings' underlying connection, the plumbing that lets third party tools, including the popular open source Home Assistant project, talk to Samsung's smart home…
The free ride is ending for a corner of the smart-home world. Starting in October, Samsung will charge $4.99 a month to individual developers and hobbyist users who plug into its SmartThings smart-home platform. The new tier also pulls in the popular open-source Home Assistant integration, which has long relied on Samsung's free plumbing to bridge its software to SmartThings hardware.
The change was first reported by The Verge, which described a new structure that captures "advanced smart home users who directly access the SmartThings API or use third-party tools" alongside individual developers. Samsung's own SmartThings blog post, titled "A New Enhanced SmartThings API Experience," confirms the move and frames it as funding "enterprise-grade features" partners and users have asked for: stability improvements, new integrations, and a refresh of the Developer Center. The Verge's account is also corroborated by a pinned community forum thread from SmartThings staff.
For the open-source side, the concern is more direct. Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen said the Home Assistant integration will fall under SmartThings' new "personal plans," meaning thousands of users who rely on the free bridge between Samsung's hardware and their self-hosted dashboards now sit inside a paid tier they did not sign up for. The Open Home Foundation newsletter, which backs Home Assistant, frames the change as part of a broader "disposable smart home" problem: platforms that hook users in, then reprice the surface they depend on.
Samsung's justification is the standard platform-investment line. In its own post, the company says the new tiers will let it invest in "enterprise-grade features": stability, integration breadth, and developer tooling that paying customers and partners have asked for. The Open Home Foundation reads the same change differently, as evidence that closed smart-home stacks can shift the cost of their integration layer onto hobbyists and open-source projects whenever business needs shift.
The structural risk here is not unique to Samsung. Smart-home hardware prices dominate consumer attention; the underlying APIs that let devices and software talk to each other are usually free, then quietly become paid. When they do, hobbyist integrations and open-source bridges are often the first to feel it, because they tend to sit on top of free tiers that platform owners eventually want to monetize.
The pricing story is also narrower than the headlines make it sound. The $4.99 monthly plan is labeled for non-commercial, individual developers. Beyond that, Samsung has signaled "various" new paid tiers, including for enterprise and commercial use, but exact pricing for higher tiers has not been published, and the announcement gives "starting October" without a specific day. Until Samsung posts the full price sheet and a launch date, the only firm number for end users is the $4.99 personal plan.
For SmartThings households who never touch the API directly, nothing changes immediately. For anyone running automations, custom device handlers, or a Home Assistant instance that bridges to SmartThings hardware, October is the moment to watch what Samsung actually puts behind the paywall, and whether Home Assistant or other third-party tools carve out an exemption.