curious, is there a vendor that isn't "cloud-first" today? I've never seen an appliance that doesn't call home

The one that frustrates me the most is Home Depot's HubSpace. You do not have to link the devices to the router. They can be operated by Bluetooth.

However, the app to control them cannot work without a connection to the server. It has no local device functions at all. It won't even launch if their servers are offline.

That's just next-level stupid to me. Why build in a useless option? If Bluetooth won't work without a server connection anyway, what's the point?

At some point a team of developers fought for local control. They lost but it's too expensive to rip out again. So management chooses to sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist. Stalking your users is so much more profitable.

The "feature" is end user tracking and isn't for you, it's for the vendor. So if the servers are down they don't care about the rest of it.

Pretty much any vendor selling commercial appliances. SpeedQueen even gives you the choice of the old school mechanical controls. I don't know if they even have any smart consumer devices. They can be a bit more expensive but rarely break from household use.

For smaller non-appliance stuff there's CloudFree [1] which sells products from other vendors that can be reflashed with ESPHome (no affiliation, just a happy customer).

[1] https://cloudfree.shop/

I've bought from cloud Free before, worked great.

The trick is to get a ZigBee device instead of a WiFi one. It's an inherently local-only protocol and you can make your computer a Hub with a $30 stick.

ZWave is another option here too. I wouldn't recommend devices that don't have at least a "500 series"[0] chipset, but pretty much any device you'd buy today or moving forward will contain this or a newer chipset.

[0] https://www.silabs.com/wireless/z-wave/500-series-modules

Z-Wave is also nice because it's in the 860/900 MHz band. Better propagation through walls and so much less contention than 2.4 GHz.

Yes, ZWave is good too, though I haven't seen many devices in the wild myself - this might depend on your local market.

Esphome supports several AC units using a simple dongle: https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/pioneer-mini-split...

Shelly devices are great. They have a "cloud" that you can optionally use, but the settings (at least on the switchable plug and the in-wall energy-monitoring switches that I have) default to that cloud connectivity being OFF. They seem to be aligned with those of us who prefer local data, interoperability and despise vendor lock-in and surveillance capitalism.

My Venstar T7900 thermostat has a local HTTP API. It has some cloud stuff too, but I've never created an account or let it talk to the Internet.