I opened a 5,000,000 Sat channel to Bitrefill so that I could buy gift cards and make some Sats from forwards. It worked well. However, I will soon have all the balance on the inbound/remote side. Their fee rate is 2,000 ppm, so I don’t think I’m going to see much of that return to me.
What would you do in this situation? I sent them an e-mail, and they are routing it to the correct person. I basically said that I’d like to be able to re-balance it so that I can keep buying gift cards from them and routing traffic to them.
If I can’t re-balance it at a reasonable cost, I wonder if I have to close it and open a new one and keep doing that as a way to make Sats as long as my fee rate will more than make back my opening and closing costs.
Thanks for reading.
I’d open a new channel if I needed it, or wait for the channel to route my way. When liquidity is on their side it is not tying up your sats 
Previously, like a year ago, Bitrefill was a steady source, at least in my experience, so the liquidity was always on their peer’s side, but that has changed.
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Thank-you. That makes sense. I’ll watch their fee rate for a while. Maybe they have a script and it will start to lower their fees so that I see some movement back toward me.
Plus, if I leave it open and they choose to close it later, then that will save me the on-chain closing fees, I think.
I’ve never been able to figure our Bitrefill’s fee policies. I see that they have lower fees than 2000 sats towards some of their peers, but I’ve never been one of those lucky ones.
It is the channel opener who will pay the closing fee, regardless of who decides to close the channel.
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Regardless of whom closes the channel, all fees are paid by the partner who created it. At this point, you are weighing the odds of sats routing back to you versus the odds of a force-close, which would be more expensive than a cooperative close initiated by you now. If your node is fairly solid, the risk may be worth the reward. If you have a Raspberry Pi node over Tor, then you may eventually want to close the channel yourself.
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Just increase fee more, 5k or 10k of ppm and problem solved)
If routing aktiv in some time channel will be full again.
If not just close some full channel and create new channel to beitrefill, or if you habe some sats create new channel with high fee at the start
If anyone is still following this or finds it later, it has re-balanced over time. I find it hard to imagine someone willing to pay the 2,000 ppm fee that Bitrefill is charging for sats going toward me on our channel, but it happened.
Much better than having to re-balance it myself and paying those fees!