This is why I downvoted you: I was asking a legit question but was treated as a joke. I was hoping the Fediverse would have less of Reddit's nonsense replies but I guess not.

Not sure if you have an extra raspberry pi 4, but if you already have any smart home stuff there is no need to wait a few years, get it going now! (It can also be setup and run on a normal computer with windows/mac/Linux.

I keep mentioning the raspberry pi because they have so many uses that aren’t just limited to home assistant vs dedicated hardware for home assistant. Looking at costs tho it wouldn’t save you any money to get the Pi, a micro SD card, charger and a case vs the home assistant green coming with all that. But keep in mind you will need an adapter if you want to integrate devices that use Zwave or zigbee. They aren’t that expensive and the one I have is the Nortek HUSBZB-1, i think I paid about $30 for it and does both Zwave and zigbee, but the home assistant yellow has zigbee built in, if you choose to go that route.

But remember Home Assistant does need a little bit of knowledge with technology or some patience when you start. It’s selling point is that it can integrate almost anything, not that it is easy to integrate everything. I started years ago and had no knowledge so it was a huge learning curve, but they’ve made incredible progress with streamlining integrations and they have fantastic documentation so the learning curve isn’t nearly what it used to be. For reference, when I started automations had to be written in YAML, now it’s done through a UI. And contrary to how these comments may have seemed, the community is great, very friendly and very helpful.