Ugreen is making a play for the local-first smart home, and it’s not being shy about the price tag. At IFA this week, the company best known for power banks and NAS boxes unveiled HomeAgent, a three-tier hub system that fuses a NAS, a security camera NVR, and an on-device AI assistant into one piece of hardware. The pitch is straightforward: your video footage, personal files, and smart home automations all live on a box in your home, with no monthly cloud fees and no data leaving your network.
The entry-level HA100 starts at $899 on Kickstarter this October, climbing to $2,999 for the HA100 Pro and a staggering $9,999 for the MasterAgent MA100, which runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor T5000 platform. Ugreen says pricing will roughly double after the crowdfunding phase. All three variants process video locally and support natural language voice control through Uliya, the company’s assistant, with capabilities like cross-camera tracking, package and pet alerts, and queries such as “where is my pet now?”
The smart home hub category is getting crowded fast. SwitchBot, Reolink, and Aqara have all staked claims, and Anker launched a competing Eufy MindBase at the same show. HomeAgent leans on the Matter standard for third-party device support via Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Thread, and Bluetooth, though Ugreen’s compatibility list is currently thin — lights, switches, sensors, and curtains from brands like Aqara, Eve, and SwitchBot. The company is also shipping a smart speaker and three SynCare cameras, plus an E Ink photo frame that pulls images straight from the hub.
Here’s the honest caveat: “local-first” isn’t the same as fully local. Push notifications and remote camera viewing still require internet access, and Uliya can fall back to the cloud if you let it. That’s a reasonable tradeoff for most people, but it muddies the privacy pitch slightly. The real test won’t be the hardware specs — it’ll be whether HomeAgent plays nicely with gear people already own. A $9,999 box that only talks to a handful of approved devices is a very expensive paperweight, no matter how smart the AI inside it is.
