The tado° app is available free on iOS and Android and acts as the control hub for tado's V3+ and older heating hardware. It is well-designed, genuinely useful, and — for most features — works without any subscription. The catch is that the most-marketed capabilities (geofencing and open window detection running automatically) sit behind the Auto-Assist subscription at £2.99 per month or £27.99 per year. Whether that cost is justified depends entirely on how you use the system.
App overview: iOS and Android
The tado° app launches on iOS 13.0+ and Android 5.0+, covering virtually every smartphone in use in the UK today. The interface is clean and tile-based: each room or zone appears as its own card showing the current temperature, target temperature, and the active mode (Smart Schedule, Manual, or Away). You can override any zone with a tap and set a duration — until the next schedule block, for a set number of hours, or until you manually cancel. Multiple household members can each install the app under the same home; presence detection tracks every phone simultaneously.
The home screen also surfaces a real-time weather overlay, which feeds into the system's weather compensation logic. For homes with a separate hot water cylinder, a dedicated hot water card sits alongside the heating zones. Overall, the app is one of the more polished in the smart heating category — less cluttered than Drayton Wiser's and faster to navigate than Honeywell's.
Geofencing: how it works
Geofencing is tado°'s headline feature. When the last registered household member's phone leaves a configurable radius around the home, the system drops to a frost-protection minimum. When the first person starts heading back, tado° calculates the required pre-heat time and starts warming the home to reach your target temperature on arrival.
There is an important nuance for UK users: without Auto-Assist, geofencing sends you a notification but does not act automatically. You tap the notification to confirm the change. With Auto-Assist, the whole loop — detecting departure, adjusting setpoint, pre-heating on return — happens without any input from you. For households where someone is usually home, geofencing delivers modest savings; for households that are empty for most of the working day, it is where the bulk of the energy saving comes from.
AI heating: Home & Away intelligence
tado° added AI-driven heating features to its V3+ line in 2025 and 2026, building on the existing weather adaptation and geofencing logic. The system uses your historical heating patterns alongside live weather data to refine pre-heat timing and flow temperature targets over time. On OpenTherm boilers, tado° can modulate the boiler's flow temperature — running it cooler and more steadily rather than cycling on and off — which is where energy savings tend to be highest.
tado° claims savings of up to 22% on heating bills compared with a traditional programmer. Independent research by BEAMA and Salford University found savings of 10–22% are realistic for UK homes, equivalent to roughly £80–£200 per year at current Ofgem tariffs. The AI heating features are part of Auto-Assist; without a subscription you get weather-aware notifications but not automatic adjustments.
Schedules
Weekly scheduling is fully available without any subscription. You set target temperatures for each time block across each day of the week, per zone. The schedule editor is straightforward: drag the block edges to adjust times, tap a block to change the temperature. You can copy a day's schedule to other days, which speeds up setup considerably.
The Smart Schedule automatically switches between your programmed temperatures and away mode based on time of day — even if you do not use geofencing. For households with a regular routine, schedule-only use (no subscription) is a perfectly valid and cost-free way to run the system.
Energy Savings report
The Energy Savings section of the app provides a monthly breakdown of what contributed to your heating efficiency. It tracks geofencing hours in Away Mode, weather adaptation instances, open window detection activations, flow temperature optimisation, and Smart Schedule hours at reduced temperatures. Each line item is presented as an estimate of energy saved, alongside a comparison with a traditional thermostat on the same schedule.
A basic Savings Summary — showing last month's estimated saving — is free for all users. The full detailed breakdown, including 13 months of historical data, is gated behind Auto-Assist. tado° also introduced real-time energy cost visualisation in 2025, letting you see live spend in pence-per-hour based on your entered tariff rate. This feature is a meaningful step forward for UK users managing energy costs under the Ofgem price cap.
Integrations: Home Assistant, Alexa, and Google
Home Assistant has an official tado° integration that supports climate control, presence detection, water heater control, and energy tracking across V3+ devices. Setup uses device-code authentication. One important caveat for V3+ users: from January 2026, tado° enforces daily API rate limits that vary by subscription tier, which can cause polling failures in Home Assistant if you have a large number of zones. The integration defaults to a five-minute polling interval, which is usually within quota. For full details see the Home Assistant tado° integration docs. Note that tado° X devices use Matter and connect via the Home Assistant Matter integration rather than the cloud API.
Amazon Alexa and Google Home are both supported via tado°'s cloud skill and action respectively. Voice commands let you set temperatures per room, switch modes, and query current readings. Neither platform requires Auto-Assist; the voice integrations work on the free tier.
If you are planning a wider Home Assistant heating setup, our guide to tado vs Nest for UK homes compares integration depth across both systems, and our tado° Smart Radiator Thermostat review covers how TRVs extend the app's per-room control to individual radiators.
UK price
The tado° V3+ Wireless Smart Thermostat Starter Kit is available from Amazon UK — find the latest price on Amazon.co.uk — with prices typically ranging from around £100 to £150 depending on the kit variant. The kit with hot water control adds the programmer bridge that handles cylinder scheduling. Each additional Smart Radiator Thermostat (TRV) for room-by-room control costs around £50–£80 per valve, with prices varying by retailer.
The Auto-Assist subscription costs £2.99 per month or £27.99 per year — equivalent to roughly £2.33 per month on the annual plan. You can start and cancel any time from Settings in the app. If your household is out for most of the working day, the subscription typically pays for itself in energy savings within the first month of use.
Verdict
The tado° app is well-built and covers all the bases: intuitive scheduling, solid geofencing, clear energy reporting, and reliable integrations with Home Assistant, Alexa, and Google Home. The free tier is genuinely usable — schedule-only control is free forever, and Alexa/Google voice control costs nothing extra.
The Auto-Assist subscription at £2.99/month is the honest dividing line. If your home is empty during the day and you want geofencing to run automatically, it earns its cost easily. If someone is always home, or you prefer to manage schedules manually, the free tier may be all you need. Either way, the app itself is one of the strongest in the UK smart heating market — polished, reliable, and regularly updated.
