If you run Home Assistant, there’s a decent chance you also run HACS. It’s the add-on almost everyone ends up installing sooner or later, because the official integration catalog, large as it is, never covers everything. Custom cards, oddball device integrations, themes someone built for fun — HACS was how all of that got onto your system. On October 26, 2026, Franck Nijhof, known in the community as "Frenck" and one of the core Home Assistant developers, posted on his personal blog that HACS is being folded directly into Home Assistant itself. The title of the post says it plainly: "HACS is now the Home Assistant Marketplace."
Starting with the upcoming Home Assistant 2026.11 release, HACS stops being something you bolt on. It becomes a built-in feature called Marketplace, living under Settings → Marketplace in the interface. For anyone running Home Assistant, this is one of the bigger changes to land in a single release lately, so let’s go through what actually moves, what doesn’t, and what you need to do about it (short version: not much).
What HACS was
For anyone who hasn’t run into it yet: Home Assistant ships with official support for a huge range of smart plugs, thermostats, cameras, and the rest. But the community has always built more than that, custom integrations for niche hardware, alternative dashboard cards, extra themes, code that never went through the process of becoming an official, bundled integration. HACS, short for Home Assistant Community Store, was how all of that got distributed. It started as a side project by a community developer, ludeeus (Joakim), and grew into something close to a rite of passage: if you were running a serious home automation setup, you installed HACS. About a year and a half before this announcement, the project was donated to the Open Home Foundation, the nonprofit that now stewards Home Assistant, which is presumably what made this kind of deeper integration possible in the first place.
What actually changes in 2026.11
Everything you had installed through HACS gets carried over automatically into the new Marketplace feature — your custom integrations, cards, themes, all of it. Home Assistant handles the migration itself; you shouldn’t need to reinstall anything by hand.
The standalone HACS add-on is going away as an independent project. From 2026.11 onward, Home Assistant blocks installing the old separate add-on, and per Frenck’s post, HACS itself won’t get any new releases either. Bug reports that used to go to the HACS repository now go to the main Home Assistant issue tracker instead, which tells you something about how the project is being maintained going forward.
A couple of things stay exactly the same. Updates installed through Marketplace still need a manual restart to take effect, just like HACS always required — Frenck’s post says this is the case "for now," without promising when that might change. And the first time you open Marketplace, you’ll still get a warning screen reminding you that community-built integrations, cards, and themes run with full access to your Home Assistant instance. Same risk, same caution, just relocated.
Does this cost anything?
If you’ve used HACS for a while, this is probably the question on your mind. Frenck answers it directly: no. Nothing about this change costs money, and nothing is going to start costing money because of it. Marketplace isn’t a paid app store grafted onto Home Assistant — it’s the same free, community-driven way of distributing third-party integrations and frontend tweaks, just living inside the product now instead of next to it.
What’s not confirmed yet
Frenck’s post mentions, almost in passing, that Marketplace could eventually surface official Home Assistant Core integrations alongside community ones, turning it into one place to browse everything. Worth being careful here: he frames that explicitly as an idea floating around, not something decided. Nothing has been locked in, so treat it as a maybe, not a roadmap item.
What you need to do
Honestly, not much right now. The migration is automatic, so once you update to 2026.11, your existing custom integrations, cards, and themes should show up under Marketplace without you touching anything. That said, it’s still worth taking a full backup of your Home Assistant configuration before any major version update, HACS-related or not, and skimming the release notes for whatever custom components you rely on, just in case any of them need their own adjustments for 2026.11.
Step back far enough and this is also a small signal about where Home Assistant’s governance is heading. A project that started as one developer’s side hustle is now, through its donation to the Open Home Foundation and this move into core, treated as a first-class part of the platform rather than something bolted on from outside. Given how many people in this corner of self-hosting lean on Home Assistant to tie their devices together, that seems like a sensible place for it to land.
Frenck’s full post is worth reading directly: HACS is now the Home Assistant Marketplace.