Home App Apple Intelligence Features Require 2TB iCloud+ Plan
What You Need to Know
- Apple Intelligence Home app features require 2TB iCloud+ plan at $9.99 monthly.
- Home app can now summarize motion alerts, group camera footage, and search video naturally.
- 2TB iCloud+ tier supports unlimited HomeKit Secure Video cameras; camera storage doesn’t count against limit.
- Server-side processing of footage justifies Apple’s pricing tier requirement for AI features.
Apple has now put a price floor on its smartest Home app features. According to details shared in the notes for the third macOS Golden Gate beta, using Apple Intelligence camera features inside the Home app will require a 2TB iCloud+ plan, which costs $9.99 per month.
The features in question arrived with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate. The Home app can now generate written summaries for motion alerts from HomeKit Secure Video cameras, group footage from separate cameras into an activity overview, surface noteworthy recordings, and support natural language search across that footage. Apple announced at WWDC that some Apple Intelligence features would carry an iCloud+ requirement, but the specific tier was left unspecified until now.
What the 2TB tier actually buys you
The tiered structure of HomeKit Secure Video has always mapped onto iCloud storage plans. The 50GB plan covers one camera, the 200GB plan supports up to five, and the 2TB plan allows an unlimited number. The new Apple Intelligence Home features sit exclusively at that top tier, which means anyone already paying for unlimited camera support gets the AI layer included. One detail worth keeping in mind: HomeKit camera storage does not count against the iCloud storage limit, so the full 2TB remains available for photos and other data.
The pricing logic follows a pattern Apple has been building across its AI rollout. Because these features process footage on Apple’s servers rather than entirely on-device, the cost scales with server-side usage, giving Apple a straightforward rationale for gating them behind its highest consumer storage tier.
For users already subscribing to the 2TB plan for camera storage alone, the upgrade is automatic. For everyone else, the question is whether AI-generated summaries and natural language search justify roughly doubling or quadrupling their current monthly iCloud spend. That calculation depends almost entirely on how many cameras they run and how often they actually review footage.
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