Show HN: Domika – A Native Mobile App for Home Assistant

[bealex]

My friend and I wanted a simpler mobile Home Assistant client—mainly for our non-tech-savvy family members—so we built one for iOS and Android. It includes a completely free 7-day trial and a demo mode. Feel free to check it out! Feature requests and bug reports are very welcome.

[nicolaslem]

As someone who is routinely impressed by Home Assistant and its official iOS app, I think you will have a tough time convincing users to switch.

> For comparison, Home Assistant’s Nabu Casa service costs several times more.

Undercutting Home Assistant's added services on price doesn't feel particularly elegant since this is what they use to fund HA development.

[bealex]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! We’re not trying to convince anyone to switch—Home Assistant’s app is powerful, no doubt, and we’ve got a ton of respect for what the team has built. Our focus is a bit different: we’re building a clean, elegant dashboard that’s easy for anyone in the household to use, not just the HA admin. We also offer a few things that aren’t available out of the box with HA, or that take more effort to set up. Think of it more as a complement than a replacement.

[nullfield]

I still am not going to rent software like this. I get why you need MRR or something, but if that’s the case sell me the product-$30? $40?-after a brief trial, and promise a year? the next major version (or at least a year)? of upgrades.

Then don’t cause major versions casually, and charge a reasonable upgrade fee when more value is delivered with a major upgrade.

I get that you have expenses, and things like servers cost money-but you’re not providing the server here.

[bealex]

We’d love to make the app cheaper or even free — we are definitely not in this to get rich. We built something we personally love using, and we believe it’s a unique project: no one else is making native Home Assistant clients like this.

But we’re also a small group of independent developers, and it’s a pretty complex app. We’ve already spent over a year building it, and we can’t keep putting in time and money unless it at least pays for itself. We’re still figuring out whether there’s enough interest to support it long-term. If not… well, that tells us what we need to know.

Home Assistant isn’t exactly mainstream, so we’re not expecting millions of users. It’s simple math — either a small number of people pitch in a bit to keep it going, or the project dies.

I don’t know if 1.5 USD/month (or 3 USD for the family plan) is a big stretch — it’s about the cost of a cup of coffee. And if you work in tech and earn something like 50 USD/hour, that’s 3–4 minutes of your time. If the app saves you even that much effort each month, it’s probably worth it. If not — fair enough!

[dtkav]

I'm your target audience. I use home assistant. I care about having a beautiful UI for it on Android. I wanted to buy your thing.

Put your pricing up front - don't waste my time.

[bealex]

Appreciate the feedback—and you’re right, pricing should be easy to find. The reason we left it out initially was that app stores adjust the price by country, so listing one number could be misleading for a lot of users. That said, we hear you. We’ve added the US pricing to the site so people at least have a ballpark.

[dtkav]

Thanks - it still feels hidden under the heading "Free or paid?".. what an unnecessarily confusing heading.

IMO you should add it to the top of the page. You don't need to explain to people why you charge money. Don't be afraid to state your offering - you are running a business.

I get that you want to charge different people different amounts of money, but maybe test whether they are actually turned off my $2/month, or if they still make it far enough through the funnel to get whatever regional discount helps them over the line.

A good comp might be Tessie [0] -- They are loved by users even though the Tesla app can do a lot of the same things for free.

[0] https://tessie.com/pricing

[nxrabl]

It may be different on the Android side, but the listed prices on the iOS app store are $2/mo or $20/yr for the individual plan and $4/mo or $40/yr for the family plan.

[askz]

Why would you hide the pricing from your website?

[bealex]

Good question! We didn’t mean to hide the pricing. The reason we left it off originally is that app stores adjust prices by country, and we didn’t want to confuse people by listing just the US price or trying to maintain a huge list of 150+ regional prices. That said, we get that having a ballpark is better than nothing, so we’ve now added the US pricing to the site.

[hnlurker22]

Awesome job, especially going fully native.

[bealex]

Thanks! That means a lot — native all the way!