Futurehome subscription: bankruptcy, paywall and the bounty that followed

Updated on October 3, 2026

After bankruptcy, Futurehome put its Smarthub behind a 1,188 NOK yearly subscription, and a bounty-winning Home Assistant replacement followed.

When Ars Technica reported it on 28 July 2025, the story looked like a sudden switch. It was not sudden. Futurehome AS was declared bankrupt on 20 May 2025, the platform was bought out of the estate, and from 26 June 2025 the Smarthub's core features required a 1,188 NOK (about $117) annual subscription. The four-week grace period had just ended when the news broke.

What you lose without paying is not trivial. The Consumer Rights Wiki adds that the local API, MQTT and integrations such as Home Assistant and Homebridge are locked too, leaving only basic on-device control. Futurehome claims 38,000 households.

Hardware paid for once, features rented back by the year.

The corporate structure matters. The FAQ says the platform was bought 50% by the former owners and 50% by Sikom Connect, and is run by FHSD Connect AS. So the people who sold the hardware under a one-time-fee model are, in part, the same people now charging for it. We are not saying that is illegal. We are saying it is a convenient arrangement for the sellers and a poor one for the buyers.

The local access question is the one technically minded owners care about. Futurehome says it cannot guarantee that local API access will not change, and CEO Øyvind Fries told Tek.no that the company had to spend resources hardening security against firmware cracking efforts. Security is a fair concern. It is also a tidy label for closing the one door that lets customers leave.

Then came the community response. As XDA Developers noted, right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann offered a $5,000 bounty (announced 16 July 2025) to anyone who bypassed the lockout, plus legal defence funds for developers, while Futurehome leadership described bypass attempts as illegal hacking. On 30 August 2025, Adrian Jagielak won the bounty with a Home Assistant replacement for the Futurehome app, according to the Consumer Rights Wiki timeline. We found no regulator action and no reversal of the subscription.

Our take is simple. Futurehome is hardly the first case, and the wiki itself points to the 2020 Wink subscription episode. The lesson stays the same: if a device needs a vendor's cloud to do its job, you own a licence, not a product. For a thermostat or a fire alarm, that is an uncomfortable thing to discover after the vendor goes bankrupt. Prefer hubs that work locally, and treat any promised lifetime cloud as a liability.

Opinion · My 12-month bet

My bet: no regulator touches this in the next twelve months. Nothing in the material shows any action, and the fee has stood since 26 June 2025. Meanwhile, the Home Assistant replacement that won the bounty will be the real exit for owners who refuse to pay.

I expect the company to keep treating bypass work as a security problem, and I expect hobbyists to keep treating it as ownership. Hardware buyers will remember who paid twice.

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Original source: Ars Technica

Produced with AI support and reviewed by the newsroom

Falcon · Signals analyst · Riyadh

“A bankruptcy sale is a neat way to shed a promise, and 38,000 households inherited the bill.”