I am utilizing Bitcoin BTC Lightning Network's incoming liquidity channel services.

My node's channels are all from incoming channel services, one from concept and the other from LNBIG. I decided to close the one from LNBIG because that node seems not to be well connected to the services I use the most and because the routing fees were much higher than usual.

And if I close the channel, I can choose the slowest fees to pay on-chain, but if the other party closes it, they may choose a higher cost, and I don't know if that fee will come out of the total I have in my side.

I still have one channel open that I will continue to use, and so far, I have already reached 100% utilization while LNBIG only had 50%, so I knew after one month, the channel could be closed by the LNBIG operator.

Now my coincept channel is open with over 100% utilization. Still, with very little money on my side, I don't know if utilization will be enough to prevent channel closure by the other party. I guess I will have to wait and see.

I think incoming channels have been an excellent idea because you don't need to have the whole amount to receive liquidity. You pay a fee for someone else to put upfront the initial collateral to have a channel.

Another improvement I have seen which is the most important to me is the routing fees, I have only paid a few satoshis for routing my payments, and with a cost lower than 20 satoshis, my prices have been going through. A year ago, I decided to move to BCH because the transaction fees on LN were just too expensive.

With wallets like ZAP desktop, you can set up how much the transaction should cost in satoshis, and the node will try to find a route at the price you have preselected. The fact that I can send up to 0.003 for just 20 satoshis is an improvement from my book. And something worth writing about, mainly because this will mean cheap transaction fees altcoins could see themselves with a problem that Bitcoin doesn't have. At least that until LN node operators get greedy and start hiking up the costs for routing.

Suppose you will receive up to one million satoshis at a given time but don't have that value sitting on your BTC wallet but enough to have someone else open up a channel. In that case, you could utilize services like Thor, LNBIG, and Coincept to have enough room to receive a Lightning Network payment. Out of those three services, I would recommend only Coincept because they have a fair base fee and a competitive opening channel fee. While Thor is as twice as expensive as Coincept, and LNBIG has a competitive opening channel fee, since they have a lot of nodes and their liquidity spread among many nodes, you could end up with the issue I had, which was that my node would have a hard time routing payments.

Overall, since I stopped using Lightning Network a year ago, I have seen changes now that I decided to experiment and play with it. The routing fees have improved a lot, and now you don't need to be connected directly to the node you are sending your money to have cheap transaction fees. If you want free transactions, you will need to be tied closer to your final destination. In my case, that is WoS and Chivo wallet node.

Paying twenty satoshis for transactions is cheap from my perspective. Still, for others, it may not be, especially when you count that to have an incoming channel, you need at least ten thousand satoshis, plus you must have a good channel utilization; otherwise, your paid incoming channel could be close. Lightning Network is not perfect, but it has improved since one year ago.

I must add that I don't know exactly how future on-chain transaction fees will affect incoming channel services. I guess it will become more expensive and that small channels like mine won't be possible if costs ever reach an all-time high of $50 or more like in the past.