The routing revenue question deserves an honest answer: routing fees on a new node are close to zero for months, and probably never meaningful unless you have substantial capital in channels and good connections.
The real split is what kind of node you're running:
Routing node (business): You need 5M+ sats per channel, active liquidity management, fee tuning, rebalancing. It can eventually generate a few hundred sats/day per million sats deployed. The capital requirement and operational overhead is real. f_marek and DarthCoin's advice here is right.
Personal payment node: You're not routing anything — you're operating your own payment rail. The value isn't sats/day, it's removing custodial trust from every payment you make. No exchange, no withdrawal fees, no KYC for the routing hop. The 'income' is sovereignty + fee savings over time.
Most people who run nodes are doing the second thing but benchmarking against the first, then quitting. If you're asking about income, you're probably better served by understanding which one you actually want to run.
The routing revenue question deserves an honest answer: routing fees on a new node are close to zero for months, and probably never meaningful unless you have substantial capital in channels and good connections.
The real split is what kind of node you're running:
Routing node (business): You need 5M+ sats per channel, active liquidity management, fee tuning, rebalancing. It can eventually generate a few hundred sats/day per million sats deployed. The capital requirement and operational overhead is real. f_marek and DarthCoin's advice here is right.
Personal payment node: You're not routing anything — you're operating your own payment rail. The value isn't sats/day, it's removing custodial trust from every payment you make. No exchange, no withdrawal fees, no KYC for the routing hop. The 'income' is sovereignty + fee savings over time.
Most people who run nodes are doing the second thing but benchmarking against the first, then quitting. If you're asking about income, you're probably better served by understanding which one you actually want to run.