Voltage is deprecating their individual hosted node offering to focus on enterprise lightning.
Over the last two years, we made a deliberate bet on enterprises: crypto exchanges, neobanks, fintech wallets, and gaming companies. It wasn't that we cared less about individuals. We found that enterprises were the fastest, widest way to actually reach them. When one exchange or wallet runs on Voltage, Lightning quietly reaches millions of people who will never spin up a node themselves and never need to. That is the leverage we were always looking for.
The bet worked. We grew ~1,000% over the last 18 months, and today Voltage helps facilitate a meaningful share of public Lightning transactions worldwide.
They acknowledge that small nodes was a big part of the beginning of their company:
Self-serve was the foundation of this company. It is how thousands of builders met Voltage, how the brand was built, and how we learned what Lightning actually needs to work at scale.
But as with so many things in Lightning, it seems that while the little users aren't showing up, enterprise customers still are.
If you are currently using their self-serve option:
If you're interested in continuing on Voltage's infrastructure and your organization has growing transaction volume or infrastructure needs, please complete this form to connect with our Sales team and discuss available options.
On July 13, 2026 the ability to add any new infrastructure will be shut off. The services that are already enabled on your account will be the only thing available from your dashboard (i.e LND nodes, LNBits, BTCPay, etc.)
Self-serve infrastructure, as a whole, will be deprecated on August 31, 2026.
Customers using Voltage Enterprise are not affected by this.
For individuals, a Voltage infra for a node was quite dumb. It doesn't worth the cost for a node.
With a simple Lightning Pub in a simple PC, for an individual is more than enough.
For businesses /* enterprise is totally another story.
It was pretty cheap a few years ago. They were operating at a loss though probably so it's hard to build a business on that.
totally agree on that. They were pioneers in this business, like NODL cloud too.
NODL!! I still have my nodl coaster and box. I was rooting for them. I really liked the founder when he went on pods.
My memory is that when I looked it was $20 or so a month. I wasn't selling that many posters and so it didn't make sense for me.
Exactly. At least if you can cover the routing fees with some sells, make sense.
Let's think about this:
So where is the difference of 15 bucks/mo?
I remember looking in to voltage as a solution for my webstore. I never used it because it was too expensive and I figured I could come up with a solution on my own.
running the bitcoin node and a lightning node in a data center for high speed clearnet routing came out very close to their cost since they shared the bitcoin node amongst many lnd nodes.
routing from your house doesn't work
noice!
that really caught my eye! I wonder if that is just some few big customers (like a Lightspark or CashApp some other big entity) or if there are a bunch of smaller companies using their services.
I'd guess small guys where lightning is important but less central to the business.
time to migrate and self host your routing node i guess. will spend some time this summer finally setting up nixos with lnd. it was a side quest i had put off for awhile as a happy voltage customer.