While being net negative with at least 430k sats (probably over 600 at this point, not factoring in all the open channels which closing will add additional costs).
Seriously, I'm doing this since some months now and I never thought I would have the effort, risk AND lose money. I always thought that people probably aren't honest, because they don't want to share the fee-cake with further people, but I'm here to tell you (and you can try for yourself without believing me, as I did), that running a profitable LN node is probably extremely hard for you and I guess if you don't run your own "service" (like your shop that is routing payments over your node), it won't be possible.
I'm kind of sad, I invested a lot of time and thought things would run better. I'm still curious if I can recover from this but either I'm an idiot who is doing it very wrong or there is no money to be made as a not-so-big routing-only node.
BTW 60k fees I got from a single peer (LOOP), that would eat all my inbound liquidity. Not sure if that was the money pit eventually, but my total amount was going down before that, so...
"running a profitable LN node is probably extremely hard"
Indeed, in my point of view almost 90% of traffic is exchange related, no real human P2P business move the needle, so in that context:
I saw this many time in the wild:
Done, you are running a profitable node at 10% (yield) and need one year to recover the hardware cost, the risk... big (force close/hadware failure/bugs).
Congrats on your node! Would you mind sharing your Amboss page? I'm running one too and I love it. Though I'm not making much in fees. Set it up mostly to learn how things work and get the OCEAN pool rewards. It's fun, but the fact that it's an hot wallet situation does stress me out a bit, so I won't keep it a lot there.
I wonder how operators of bigger nodes handle that anxiety. I guess it just comes with the territory.
Anyway, I've been hearing people say that sending 100 dollars in sats onchain is actually cheaper now than using Lightning. Haven't dug into it much myself, but with my four channels I often can't send more than 25k sats in one go. Probably should open more channels, but I'm hesitant to lock up more sats in the node.
We will see!
hahaha they just used you as cheap node for rebalancing.
But... keep going.
Not counting energy costs, in what cases do you lose money with routing nodes?
channel opening/closing fees, upfront hardware investment
the money you put at risk is also significant
I forgot to mention, don’t count the hardware cost. Apart from energy and hardware, you only lose money with channel opening/closing fees? How can you mitigate that?
I haven't tried seriously to run a profitable LN routing node. It seems like not an easy thing to do. One thing economists like to say is "there's no free lunch". No method of earning money can be both easy and scalable.
Important is not to "run a profitable LN node" but why and how you do it.
If you try to make a serious ROI you will never be "in profit". The real income come from adjacent services you are offering.