I found nabu casa, the maker of homeassistant a good approach. You can pay 5 bucks/month to have a no-worry about cloud access to your instance.
I’d say they’re charging too little.
Aside from the friction-less remote access they also provide friction-less Google/Alexa integration.
It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too.
That right there is the best way to go. Everything in the open, everything can be self-hosted, but you can pay for the convenience of someone else doing it.