- Offsite Backups
- Voice control (Alexa & Google Home)
- Voice Processing (STT/TTS)
- Better media streaming (video/audio)
In addition to dedicated support, as part of their free Cloudflare tunnels.
Sorry for being snarky, but given the tone/point of the announcement is anti-big tech it's funny to complain that the pricing is so high compared to big tech.
Taken on its own, for the price of a nice coffee a month you also support Home Assistant development and get something in exchange. Pretty good value.
HA already has many plugins for doing voice processing locally or through other cloud providers (freely or cheaply)
A cloudflare tunnel would also give you direct access to WebRTC streams, just like being at home. HA Cloud just offers relay servers so you don't have to directly connect.
If you want to give HA money, go ahead but there's nothing truly compelling it offers that I couldn't get elsewhere for much less.