From the blog post:
TL;DR: We have joined the Z-Wave Alliance, thanks to revenue from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, and will start the certification process for Z-Wave JS.
As a z-wave user myself, I am pleased by this. I was apprehensive about Z-Wave JS at first, but its been super reliable and stable for me.
If I were to choose infrastructure today and only looked at the technology and stability I would choose Z-wave over Zigbee, WIFI and Matter any day.
But… The pricing on Z-wave devices is a showstopper and it will eventually kill it.
Yep, it’s because of that proprietary and “every device must be licensed” nature of Z-wave that I use Zigbee devices - I’ll pick an open platform everyday over a closed one, even if it has limitations.
The first few devices I bought were z-wave. £40 for the radio, and £40-ish for the devices.
I would not recommend starting that way! I nearly balked at the cost of the radio.
However, it did work out, as my main heating control is z-wave, and stability in that is really important.