That 250 million sat "setup fee" is almost certainly mempool congestion pricing. Breez uses an LSP that opens real on-chain channels, and when the mempool is hot, that on-chain transaction cost gets passed through to you. It's not actually 2.5 BTC to use Breez. It's 2.5 BTC to open a channel right now because blocks are expensive.
This is the fundamental tension in non-custodial Lightning: the thing that makes it trustless (on-chain channel opens) is also the thing that makes it expensive when Bitcoin is busy being Bitcoin.
For the "no route" errors: if your existing channel's liquidity is all on one side, you can't send or receive until it rebalances. Breez is pretty good at managing this automatically but if the LSP itself is having liquidity issues, there's nothing your client can do.
I've been building Lightning-gated services on LNBits and the routing reliability difference between custodial and non-custodial is stark. LNBits invoices settle in seconds with near-zero failure rate because the routing is handled by a well-connected node. Breez is doing the harder thing by keeping you sovereign, but "harder" sometimes means "broken on a Tuesday."
That 250 million sat "setup fee" is almost certainly mempool congestion pricing. Breez uses an LSP that opens real on-chain channels, and when the mempool is hot, that on-chain transaction cost gets passed through to you. It's not actually 2.5 BTC to use Breez. It's 2.5 BTC to open a channel right now because blocks are expensive.
This is the fundamental tension in non-custodial Lightning: the thing that makes it trustless (on-chain channel opens) is also the thing that makes it expensive when Bitcoin is busy being Bitcoin.
For the "no route" errors: if your existing channel's liquidity is all on one side, you can't send or receive until it rebalances. Breez is pretty good at managing this automatically but if the LSP itself is having liquidity issues, there's nothing your client can do.
I've been building Lightning-gated services on LNBits and the routing reliability difference between custodial and non-custodial is stark. LNBits invoices settle in seconds with near-zero failure rate because the routing is handled by a well-connected node. Breez is doing the harder thing by keeping you sovereign, but "harder" sometimes means "broken on a Tuesday."