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Costs · 8 min read · 20 February 2026

What a smart home really costs

The price of automation is not one number but four line items: wiring, the switchboard, devices and programming. We break them down and give ranges for three property sizes.

What the cost of automation is made of

The price of a smart home is not one number but four line items worth looking at separately: cabling, the automation switchboard, end devices and programming the logic. Each behaves differently when the scope changes — which is why two quotes for a “full smart home” can differ by a factor of two and both be honest.

The good news: three of those four items can be costed precisely as early as the electrical design stage. Only the fourth — programming — depends on how complex the scenarios you want are.

Cabling and the switchboard — there is only one cheapest moment

A cable run at shell stage costs the material and a few minutes of an electrician’s time. The same cable after the walls are finished means chipping off plaster, repainting and downtime on site — a multiple of the original price. This is the only item in the whole budget that genuinely grows exponentially with every month of delay.

If you take one thing from this article: ask your electrician for at least 30% spare room in the switchboard. It costs almost nothing today, and in three years it decides whether adding a function is an hour of work or a new cabinet.

The automation switchboard is a separate item from the electrical switchboard. We assemble it at our workshop, label the circuits and function-test it before dispatch — more expensive than assembling on site, but it removes most of the faults that are hard to find later.

Devices — where the budget diverges fastest

The server, input and output modules, dimmers, sensors, panels and wall switches. The number of points translates into price almost linearly, so this is the best place for deliberate cuts. A practical rule: the functions that must work on the day you move in get done in full; the rest we prepare with cabling and add later.

• Lighting and scenes — usually the largest item, because there are the most points
• Zoned heating — the cost grows with the number of zones and loops, not with floor area
• Shading — motors and a weather station, but it pays back in summer comfort
• Security — sensors are cheap; cameras and access control are not
• Multiroom audio — the most flexible item, easy to phase

Programming and commissioning

This is a separate skill from installation and a separate line in the estimate. It covers scene logic, schedules, responses to sensors, app configuration and training for the household. A house with well-programmed logic and mid-range devices works better than a house with the most expensive hardware on default settings.

Ranges for three property sizes

Below are the orders of magnitude we use in initial conversations. This is not an offer — we work out the exact scope after reviewing the electrical design, because the difference between 80 and 150 lighting points shows up in the price immediately.

• An apartment, wireless variant — most often below PLN 50,000. Limited interference with the walls, scope focused on light, climate and security.
• A house of 150–200 m², full wired automation — typically PLN 50,000–120,000, including cabling, devices, the switchboard and programming.
• A house above 300 m², or a property with a commercial part — above PLN 120,000. More zones come in, integrations of heat and energy sources, often the network and monitoring as well.

What brings the cost down, and what pushes it up

Down: an early design stage, one standard across the whole building instead of tying together devices from different manufacturers, phasing functions onto cabling that is already in place. Up: coming into a finished building, scattered systems that need integrating, a large number of wall panels where the app and a few buttons would have done.

In one of our projects the entire house runs on a single standard — 39 underfloor heating loops, a heat pump, ventilation driven by CO₂ sensors and audio, all in one set of logic. That approach costs more at the outset than assembling a system from different sources, but there is no integration cost and none of the most common source of failures.

Service and expansion after handover

The last item, rarely discussed during quoting: care for a working system. Updates, changes to scenes after a few months of living with it, inspections and remote diagnostics. Worth asking about before signing a contract — as is the question of who will hold access to the system configuration.

Want an approximate range for your property? Go to the configurator — three steps and we call back with a proposed scope. You can also look at the full range of our services.