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New Homey Pro Mini cuts the RGB (and other features), significantly lowers cost
- Athom, maker of the Homey ecosystem of smart home tools, is launching a new Homey Pro Mini.
- It has the core functionality of the standard Homey Pro but trims things out to bring down the cost to just $199.
- The $399 price of the Homey Pro is one of the most significant barriers to entry into the Homey ecosystem, so this should help to mitigate that problem.
If you’ve ever looked into Athom’s terrific smart home ecosystem, centered around its do-it-all Homey Pro hub, you might have been excited to give it a shot — but then scoffed at its $399 price tag. Previously, your only other way to get into Homey would be to use its cloud-based Homey Premium subscription. That requires a monthly fee, doesn’t allow for local/private connectivity, and also requires a $69 Homey Bridge if you want a centralized hub for your non-Wi-Fi devices.
Today, though, Athom is introducing a brand new option: Homey Pro Mini. As its name suggests, it’s a smaller, trimmed-down version of the Homey Pro. In exchange for foregoing some of the Pro’s features, the Mini comes with a significantly reduced price tag: $199, or roughly 50% of the cost of the Homey Pro.
You can check out the Homey Pro Mini’s looks in the photos above and below. Read on to learn more about what you’ll get (and won’t get) and when you can grab one for yourself.
Homey Pro Mini details
Before we get into what you lose by going with a Mini instead of the standard Pro, let’s talk about what you keep. The processor inside is the same: a 1.5GHz quad-core ARMv8 CPU. That means you should see about the same performance as you do from the Homey Pro (which is really fast). It also supports most of the same connectivity protocols, including Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Matter, and Thread. It has access to the same Homey Pro OS, which includes the ability to create Advanced Flows (a “Flow” is Athom’s name for Homey’s automation). You also get all the insights and energy tracking tools within the operating system as well as the ability to connect the Mini to one or more Homey Bridges, further expanding the hub’s power and capabilities.
Interestingly, the Homey Pro Mini even has a distinct advantage over the Homey Pro: it has a built-in Ethernet port. Inexplicably, the Homey Pro does not have this. You need to buy a pretty expensive adapter to bring this functionality, making a comparably Homey Pro even more expensive than this Mini model.
OK, now let’s go over what you lose by opting for the Homey Pro Mini instead of the standard Homey Pro. Notably, you lose out on the Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Infrared, and 433MHz protocols. Thankfully, adding a Homey Bridge solves that (except for 433MHz in the US, which is due to national regulations, not the technology itself). That means, if you want a Mini and all those protocols, you would be spending $268, which is still far less than the Homey Pro’s $399 price tag.
The Homey Pro Mini has all the core features of the Homey Pro, but you'll need to decide for yourself if you can do without what it lacks.
You also lose out on having an unlimited number of apps. You can install as many apps as you want on the Homey Pro, but the Mini only supports 20 apps. This is likely due to two factors, the first being that Athom wants to give a good reason for upselling people to the Homey Pro, and the second being that the Homey Pro Mini only has 1GB of RAM, which is 50% less than what you see in the Homey Pro. Athom tells us that the average Homey Pro user has 14 apps installed (myself, I have only 13), so this isn’t as big of a limitation as it might seem at first glance.
Finally, you also lose out on RGB lighting. This might seem like no big deal, but the RGB lights of the Homey Pro can be very useful. For example, you could have a Flow trigger the lights to turn red if there’s a problem with a connected device or turn green when the air quality is good today. Missing out on that is disappointing.
Overall, the Homey Pro Mini seems like a terrific entry point for the Homey ecosystem. It lacks the bells and whistles of the Homey Pro, sure, but most people reading this probably don’t have a smart home complicated enough to necessitate all the power it provides. If you don’t want a monthly subscription, want a completely local/private smart home, and not spend an arm and a leg, the Homey Pro Mini is worth a look. Hopefully, we’ll be able to review the Mini soon!
Pre-orders for the Homey Pro Mini are open now at the Homey website. Shipments will begin in April 2025 for the US and Canada, with European availability coming at an as-yet-undisclosed time.