You don’t need a smart home hub if you pick the right platform from the start

Buying a hub feels like the right first move. One device to manage everything, a single control point for your whole house. That logic made sense a decade ago. It mostly doesn’t anymore — and defaulting to it before you’ve figured out your ecosystem is one of the more expensive setup mistakes you can make. I built my current home setup without a dedicated hub, and it’s been more reliable than anything I’ve run before. What made the difference was picking a platform first, before buying a single device.