Beacon: A Free Skylight Alternative for Home Assistant Users
If you’ve looked at Skylight and done the math, you already know: it’s $299.99 for the hardware, then $79/year for Calendar Plus — which is where the good stuff lives. Meal planning, photo screensaver, magic import. The baseline experience without a subscription is fine. The experience you actually want costs extra, forever.
And it still doesn’t talk to Home Assistant.
That’s why I built Beacon.
What it is
Beacon is a family command center that runs as a Home Assistant add-on. It turns any wall-mounted display into a dashboard with a weekly calendar, meal planning, chore tracking, music controls, and weather — all pulling live from your existing HA entities.
No subscription. No cloud account. No data leaving your network. MIT licensed and free forever.
What I’m running it on
A Raspberry Pi 5 and a ~$100 touch monitor. That’s the whole hardware cost. If you have a spare Pi or an old tablet, you probably already have what you need. Installation is one click if you’re already on Home Assistant:
What we actually use every day
Two things get the most use: the calendar and meal planning.
The calendar pulls directly from HA calendar entities — every family member’s schedule is already there, color-coded, no manual entry required. The meal plan bar shows the week’s dinners at a glance. Combined with HomeClaw managing inventory and planning, the “what’s for dinner” conversation has basically been eliminated.
Built for LLM integration
Beacon ships with a native MCP server. If you’re running Claude, or any other tool-capable LLM, you can connect it directly to your Beacon instance. Ask it what’s on the calendar, what’s for dinner, who has chores due — the LLM has full context of what’s on your family dashboard.
It also supports Home Assistant Assist custom sentences and a voice API, so hands-free control works out of the box.
The comparison
| Skylight Calendar 2 | Beacon | |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware cost | $299.99 | Pi + ~$100 monitor |
| Subscription | $79/year (Plus) | Free forever |
| Meal planning | Plus tier only | Included |
| HA integration | ❌ | ✅ |
| MCP server | ❌ | ✅ |
| Self-hosted | ❌ | ✅ |
| Open source | ❌ | ✅ |
Get started
It’s actively developed. Feature requests welcome — open an issue or drop into the discussions tab.