Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from Oct 25

This is exactly why I’ve started only buying smart devices that work with Home Assistant and don’t rely on cloud services.

What are the best ways of finding such devices? Almost all the time when I look into some product it ends up being connected to some random cloud service with its own login.

Ditto. Landlord shoved ecobees onto us after their developer program shuttered, and when internet connected they misbehave.

Curious to hear what local polling or local push thermostat you settled on with HA support!

It isn't easy, but you just have to do your due diligence and really explore the featuresets available for a given category of product.

A shortcut however is checking out the homelab subreddit. People will post about the gear they are using in their stack.

Not the person you are asking. I'm partial to all Shelly stuff. So far very reliable and the price is ok. They do have a cloud but it is entirely optional.

HomeAssistant supports a bunch of home automation systems, including local-only ones like ZWave and Zigbee*. A search for "zwave thermostat" comes up with a lot of results, though I couldn't say how difficult it might be to configure them (I'm only using simpler devices like switches and sensors).

* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.

Ironically the latest Nest thermostats offer fully local control with Home Assistant via Matter.

Ecobees (at least the model I have) can work without internet and integrate with Home Assistant.

The Honeywell Z-Wave thermostats are trivial to connect and work with via Home Assistant.

Source: I own one. :)

Make sure that if you buy such a device it doesn’t do over the air upgrades. I bought a smart baby monitor (miku) that promised no monthly fees. Then they went bankrupt. A new company was formed that bought the assets. They disabled most functionality via forced over the air update then added a fee to enable the previously free functionality.

Last I checked you have sign-in to Google before it lets you config via Matter

I own two and they are bulletproof with Home Assistant. When away from home I just wireguard in and adjust/monitor as needed.

Isn’t that illegal? like under consumer law maybe?

Louis Rossman would love to hear from you. Here's a recent video where he covers the exact same situation as you with another company where the purchasing company disables functionality behind a subscription.

And is actively trying to prevent hackers from running stuff locally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66j9dsPhAjE

One way is to look for devices that have unofficial firmware available, so you can just overwrite the included software for something more under your control. For example, check out Tasmota, "an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices": https://tasmota.github.io/docs/

And THAT'S why my smart home stuff is on a seperate VLAN that isn't internet connected!

Nest itself did this too. My gen 1 (pre-Google) Nest did forced OTA updates. Once or twice it bricked itself; fortunately it was still able to receive updates and Nest corrected the problem.

Then they couldn't resist fiddling with the UI. Every new update changed the UI such that I had to relearn how to operate it.

That was the last straw, so I disconnected it from my wifi and just used it as a standalone thermostat.