The smart home industry has spent the last decade arguing about which vendor should own your living room, and the answer has been increasingly uncomfortable: the vendor whose cloud you are least willing to trust. Amazon, Google and Apple all sell attractive endpoints, but their most useful AI features – package detection, person recognition, voice routines – run on servers thousands of miles away. UGREEN, best known in the West as a maker of USB cables and NAS enclosures, is now betting that homeowners would rather buy one box that does all of that work locally. The HomeAgent HA100 is that box, and it goes live on Kickstarter on October 27, 2026 at a super early bird price of $899 against a $1,799 MSRP.
The positioning is deliberate. UGREEN already sells NAS units that customers fill with their own hard drives, and the HA100 borrows that DNA: it is a horizontal tower with two internal drive bays for up to 96 terabytes of raw storage, an M.2 slot, an SD card reader, HDMI out, Ethernet and a small status display on the front. Under the hood, the base HA100 runs on a Rockchip RK3588 SoC with 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory and a combined 26 TOPS of AI inference budget. The step-up HA100 Pro uses a CIX CP8180 chip with 32 GB of RAM and 205 TOPS, and the flagship MasterAgent MA100 is an Nvidia Jetson Thor box with 128 GB of unified memory and 2,070 TOPS for a $20,000 asking price.
The feature list is where the pitch gets ambitious. The HA100 is supposed to act as a local NVR for UGREEN’s SynCare cameras, run rule-based automation for curtains, lights and locks, perform categorical object recognition on camera feeds, and answer natural-language questions like “where is the dog right now?” through a companion voice assistant called Uliya. It speaks ONVIF and Matter out of the box, with Zigbee and Thread promised later. The HA100 Pro adds motion understanding, behavioral intent inference, and voice-driven rule creation. The whole stack is supposed to keep footage on your own drives, with AES-256 local encryption and end-to-end encrypted remote access.
The competitive landscape is crowded and surprisingly friendly. Amazon’s Echo Hub and Google’s Nest Hub run equivalent routines but depend on cloud inference for the interesting bits. Apple’s HomePod with Matter supports local automation but offers almost no on-device vision. Anker’s eufy array has its own local AI hub that explicitly supports Home Assistant, which the HA100 does not. Self-hosters can already run Frigate, Scrypted and Home Assistant on an old NUC, but they will not get the Uliya voice layer, the integrated NVR, or the turnkey UGREEN camera lineup. The HA100 is best understood as a NAS vendor’s answer to Home Assistant: the same privacy promise, wrapped in consumer industrial design, at a consumer price.
The strengths are real. The 26 TOPS RK3588 is enough for object detection on a handful of 1080p cameras, the drive bays mean you never pay a subscription for storage, and the Matter certification matters if you already own Philips Hue, Aqara or Eve devices. The $899 early bird price is aggressive relative to buying a comparable mini PC, a NAS and a separate NVR license. UGREEN’s existing NAS software team means the storage side of the product is likely to be more polished than a startup’s first attempt.
The weaknesses, however, are significant. First, there is no Home Assistant support, which is the single biggest reason a tinker-minded buyer would otherwise pick an Anker hub. UGREEN’s own automation layer will have to prove it is as flexible as a decade of open-source work, and early demos at the Boston launch showed only trivial curtain and light routines, not the voice rule creation that is supposed to be the headline feature. Second, the launch is a Kickstarter campaign, not a finished product. Review samples were scarce at the September unveiling, shipping is staged from January through July 2027, and the software will not be feature-complete at delivery. Third, the pricing ladder is punishing: the base HA100 is $1,799 MSRP, the Pro is $5,999, and the MasterAgent is $20,000, which makes the “privacy at a steep cost” line from Engadget’s review feel generous rather than critical. Fourth, UGREEN is a charging-cable company entering a market where firmware abandonment is the norm – buyers will want a five-year support commitment before trusting the box with camera footage.
Verdict. The HA100 is a compelling idea and a hard purchase. Back it on Kickstarter only if you want a turnkey local NVR, already own UGREEN drives, and accept that the AI agent features are a 2027 promise rather than a launch-day reality. Skip it if you run Home Assistant, want open protocol flexibility, or would rather tinker with a $400 mini PC. The $899 early bird price is fair for the hardware alone; the voice assistant and behavioral inference are what you are really betting on, and those are the parts UGREEN has not yet shipped.