The cloud sale is easy if you are an HA user already. If you don’t use Home Assistant right now, you probably rec it the target audience. I purchase the yearly cloud service as it’s an easy way to support HA development. It also gives you remote access to your system without having to do any setup. It provides an https connection which allows you to program esp32 devices through Chrome. And now they added the ability to do TTS and STT on someone else’s hardware. HA even allows you to setup a local llm for house control commands but route other queries directly to the cloud.