[mistro]

Just to chip in with a plug for HomeAssistant. I am really not very techy at all, but so far I have used the out-of-box HA Green version and:

-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator

So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.

I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.