How much does tado° Auto-Assist cost in the UK?
tado° lists Auto-Assist and its tado° X sibling AI Assist at £3.99 a month or £29.99 a year in the UK. Twelve monthly payments come to £47.88, so the annual plan saves £17.89, which tado° itself describes as a 37% discount on the monthly price. The annual plan works out at roughly £2.50 a month.
| Plan | Price | Cost over 12 months | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-Assist, monthly | £3.99 a month | £47.88 | tado° V3+ and older kit |
| Auto-Assist, annual | £29.99 a year | £29.99 | tado° V3+ and older kit |
| AI Assist, monthly | £3.99 a month | £47.88 | tado° X range |
| AI Assist, annual | £29.99 a year | £29.99 | tado° X range |
The price has been stable for a while. tado° announced the last increase in March 2024, describing it as the first rise since Auto-Assist launched in 2018, and when AI Assist arrived in September 2025 it was priced the same as the plan it replaced. Prices change and retailers bundle trials, so check the app or tado.com before you commit. The figures here are a snapshot, not a guarantee.
The subscription covers your whole tado° home rather than each device, so adding a second thermostat or more radiator valves does not add a second charge. Because it is sold as an in-app purchase, billing, renewals and cancellation go through the Apple App Store or Google Play rather than tado° directly.
What is the difference between Auto-Assist and AI Assist?
Auto-Assist is the original subscription, and AI Assist is its replacement for the tado° X range. tado° launched AI Assist in September 2025 for the Smart Thermostat X, Smart Radiator Thermostat X, Wireless Temperature Sensor X, Heat Pump Optimizer X and Bridge X, at the same £29.99 a year. Existing Auto-Assist subscribers on tado° X kit were upgraded automatically at no extra cost, while V3+ owners can still buy Auto-Assist.
The practical question is which one your hardware can buy, not which is better. If you have an X-series system you subscribe to AI Assist; if you have a V3+ or older you subscribe to Auto-Assist. tado° says AI Assist uses neural networks trained on 15 years of anonymised heating data from more than a million homes, and claims up to 55% greater savings than running tado° without it. That is a manufacturer claim measured against its own non-subscribed baseline, so treat it as an upper bound rather than what a typical UK household will see.
If you are still choosing hardware, our tado° X review covers the X range in detail, and the Hive vs tado° comparison sets out what each system charges.
What do you get for the subscription?
According to tado°'s support documentation, Auto-Assist bundles geolocation-based heating control, open window detection, flow temperature optimisation, air comfort monitoring, extended climate history, Energy IQ energy insights and an enhanced Care & Protect service with self-fix guides. The headline items are these:
- Automatic geofencing: your heating drops back when the last phone leaves and warms the house as you approach.
- Automatic open window detection: tado° spots a sudden temperature drop in a room and pauses heating there until it recovers.
- Energy IQ: a breakdown of your heating usage and costs, plus tips for cutting them.
- Care & Protect: round-the-clock monitoring that flags unusual heating behaviour and offers guided fixes.
- Extended climate history: 13 months of history instead of one day.
What still works without a subscription?
Most of the day-to-day control does. You keep weekly schedules, per-room temperature targets, remote control from the app, and voice assistant integrations without paying. Geofencing and open window detection are still present in the app, but they send a notification that you act on instead of changing the heating for you. Our tado° app review walks through the free feature set, and the smart heating schedule guide shows how to get good results from schedules alone.
In short, a subscription-free tado° behaves like a good app-controlled programmer, and the subscription turns it into a self-adjusting one. That distinction decides whether paying makes sense.
How does tado Auto-Assist work, and how does it save money?
It saves money by catching heating that would otherwise run for nobody. Geofencing lowers the target temperature when everyone is out, so the boiler fires less often. Open window detection stops a radiator heating a room while a window is open. Energy IQ and Care & Protect then show where usage is unusual and flag faults before they cost you.
tado° says roughly a third of the energy savings in homes with its system can be attributed to Auto-Assist, and that customers save an average of 22% a year on heating. Both are the company's own figures, and the second is an average across its user base rather than a promise. Savings depend heavily on how much your household is out and how well your schedule already matches your routine.
Here is a simple way to test it against your own bills. As an illustration, a household that spends £1,200 a year on heating pays £29.99, or about 2.5%, for the annual plan, so it needs to cut usage by more than that to come out ahead. Substitute your own annual gas or electricity heating spend: the higher it is, the easier the maths. A saving of even 5% on £1,200 would be £60, double the annual fee.
When does tado Auto-Assist matter for your home?
It is worth paying for if your house is regularly empty at irregular times, and probably not if your routine is fixed. Some situations, in roughly descending order of value:
- Shift workers, hybrid workers and people with unpredictable days: geofencing replaces a schedule you cannot write down. This is the strongest case for subscribing.
- Households with family members who leave windows open: open window detection quietly stops waste, particularly with several radiator valves.
- Anyone running a heat pump or multi-zone system: finer control and monitoring have more to work with, and tado° sells an optimiser for heat pumps.
- Fixed nine-to-five households with a tidy schedule: a good schedule captures most of the benefit, so you can skip the subscription.
The geofencing itself relies on your phone's location, so it works best when everyone who lives in the house has the tado° app installed with location permission granted. A partner or teenager who never installs the app is effectively invisible to the system, and tado° will treat the house as occupied or empty based only on the phones it can see. Check who is registered before deciding that geofencing does not work for you.
A sensible approach is to subscribe monthly for a heating season month or two, check Energy IQ and your meter readings, then switch to annual or cancel. Monthly costs £3.99, so a test of a couple of months costs less than the annual plan and tells you more than any manufacturer average.
Auto-Assist vs thermostats with no subscription: what are the alternatives?
Several rivals deliver comparable automation without a recurring fee, so the cost is a real purchase factor. Hive, Google Nest and Drayton Wiser all handle schedules and remote control free, and each has its own approach to geofencing and learning. Our best smart thermostat with no subscription guide compares them, and it is worth reading before you buy tado° purely because of the hardware.
The trade-off is that tado° is among the strongest options for multi-zone radiator control and has wide platform support, including Home Assistant, Apple Home and Alexa. If you already own tado° kit, the subscription is the cheaper route to automatic behaviour than replacing it.
Is tado Auto-Assist worth it, and how do you cancel?
Because Auto-Assist is an in-app purchase, tado° support says it is handled entirely through the App Store or Google Play. To cancel, open your Apple ID subscriptions or Google Play subscriptions list and cancel from there, not from tado°'s own account pages. You can subscribe monthly or annually, and tado° states you can cancel at any time. Annual subscriptions normally run to the end of the paid period, so cancelling mid-year does not usually refund the remainder, though that is governed by Apple's and Google's refund policies rather than tado°'s.
When a subscription lapses the system keeps heating your home on its schedule. You lose the automation and the extended history views; the thermostat does not stop working.
