If you are willing to put in a fair amount of effort, you can have a smart home without accounts anywhere.
Most of the account based stuff is based upon open specs.
But you have to be somewhat technical and patient.
To expand a bit, search "home assistant" or "hubitat."
Both are great, but home assistant is open source, and has the bigger community who support more devices. It is a bit more DIY than hubitat, but they have released their own hardware to go with the software, so its getting easier all the time. You can also run it on your own hardware if youre handy.
Hubitats advantages are an all in one hardware/software package and a philosophy that aims to emulate the cloudless Smartthings of yore (the old lead player in stand alone home automation until they lost their damn minds). It is still a ways DIY, but is not FOSS. Still, active community and tons of supported devices.
I tried home assistant a while ago and I couldn't wrap my head around yaml that it uses and I couldn't seem to get conditionals to work like I wanted them too. I'm not a great coder but it was not nearly as easy as I wanted it to be.
Id recommend giving hubitat a try then. Its more gui focused, with tasks being "if this, then that, except if..."
They support a wide range of apps/devices out of the box, but also have direct to import community code/addons. A lot of the smartthings devs moved over to hubitat, so the community is solid.
Unless youre in a rush, they often have $100/hub sales around major holidays too.
+1 look for devices that support Zigbee or Z-wave (or Matter now, I guess) as these are all guaranteed to have fully local control with no internet connection required. Install Home Assistant and connect via a VPN to access it while you're away from home.
If you are willing to put in a fair amount of effort, you can have a smart home without accounts anywhere.
Most of the account based stuff is based upon open specs.
But you have to be somewhat technical and patient.
To expand a bit, search "home assistant" or "hubitat."
Both are great, but home assistant is open source, and has the bigger community who support more devices. It is a bit more DIY than hubitat, but they have released their own hardware to go with the software, so its getting easier all the time. You can also run it on your own hardware if youre handy.
Hubitats advantages are an all in one hardware/software package and a philosophy that aims to emulate the cloudless Smartthings of yore (the old lead player in stand alone home automation until they lost their damn minds). It is still a ways DIY, but is not FOSS. Still, active community and tons of supported devices.
I tried home assistant a while ago and I couldn't wrap my head around yaml that it uses and I couldn't seem to get conditionals to work like I wanted them too. I'm not a great coder but it was not nearly as easy as I wanted it to be.
Id recommend giving hubitat a try then. Its more gui focused, with tasks being "if this, then that, except if..."
They support a wide range of apps/devices out of the box, but also have direct to import community code/addons. A lot of the smartthings devs moved over to hubitat, so the community is solid.
Unless youre in a rush, they often have $100/hub sales around major holidays too.
+1 look for devices that support Zigbee or Z-wave (or Matter now, I guess) as these are all guaranteed to have fully local control with no internet connection required. Install Home Assistant and connect via a VPN to access it while you're away from home.