You were probably got high fees because you were not managing liquidity. On a non-custodial wallet, if you try to receive a payment that is larger than your inbound capacity, you will get hit w/ an on-chain fee to resize the channel. The solution to this is to either spend more sats or use a service like boltz.exchange (non-custodial). This way, you can "empty" out your lightning channel.
For example:
1. You receive $50 into your new non-custodial lightning wallet, this incurs an on-chain fee. You now have no inbound liquidity, but you have $50 in outbound liquidity. You can send up to $50 over lightning.
2. You use bolts.exchange to send $50 over lightning, which is returned to you, on-chain, minus tx fees (say $48)
3. You now can receive up to $50 in your lightning wallet without paying any on-chain fees.
Think of lightning like a bucket. A bucket is a lightning channel, the water in the bucket is sats. If you buy a $50 bucket, the bucket is full to start, it can't receive any more water unless you buy a bigger bucket. If you dump some water out, now you make room for more water to be added to the bucket, and you can do this infinite times.