At what point do you just go for Home Assistant green? It's still cheaper, yes it has less ram but also consumes less power.
If all you want is HA, it's perfectly fine to run on a RPi.
But personally I've grown to host about a dozen other services so the additional compute power, storage and memory is important.
I actually have a server for my other needs and HA Green. Mostly since I want to run the mission critical stuff for my home on a different machine, this way if something were to go wrong with my home server it'd still keep working.
I should add that bigger esphome projects (with custom components) take up to 5 minutes to compile. But that honestly isn't too bad.
If all you want is HA, green is the right answer.
I got a mini PC the beginning of this year and I have a bunch of stuff running on it now, in Proxmox. It's been a lot of complicated learning, but I've had fun.
Good question. HA Green looks pretty cool. With that processor, though, running something like Frigate might not work very well.
For me, I run HA on a normal computer that I turned into a "server". Home Assistant was a gateway drug and now I run all sorts of other stuff in addition to it. I use Proxmox (as described in the article) so HA is a virtual machine, and there's a Debian virtual machine with a bunch of Docker stuff going. Having Docker run in a VM makes backups much easier.
For HA alone, the Green looks pretty cool. Most people probably won't outgrown it, but I certainly have.
Once this is edited, it'll be a great document.
But wow, maybe ask a friend to do it for ya.
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io