So you had a second channel opened to you, because your first one didn't have enough capacity to receive the new amount you sent. By default, the just-in-time services gives you 100k sats of inbound on top of the amount you're looking to receive. Whenever a new channel needs to be opened, the required fee is displayed clearly above the invoice QR. If you want to be most economical, you can use the advanced channel service through the 'Purchase inbound channel' and specify the amount and duration you need so you can do long term planning. As far as costs VS custodial. Yes, custodial wallet charges less in fees, but that's at the cost of control of your funds.

You ended up doing everything the wrong way — no surprise you had bad experience. Forget about the custodial wallet for now. Here’s how you should’ve approached Zeus: 1. Start with an on-chain transaction to your fresh, empty wallet. You can send from cold storage or an exchange. Just make sure it’s a decent amount — I recommend at least 400k sats if you’re planning to use Zeus as your main wallet. 2. Wait for the transaction to confirm in a block. Once that’s done, you’ll see a new option above your balance that says something like “Move sats to Lightning.” Tap that to open your first channel. 3. Make sure to uncheck “Use LSP.” This way you won’t rely on Zeus’ built-in liquidity service. Instead, you’ll open your own channel — no expiration date, and it’s a lot cheaper. 4. Send at minimum 150k sats to open the channel. Pick a reasonable fee for the on-chain transaction — lately, anything between 1–3 sats/vbyte has been fine. 5. After setting the amount and fee, broadcast the transaction and wait for it to confirm. This might take a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on network conditions — just be patient. 6. Once it confirms, you’ll have your own Lightning channel ready to use. It’ll show up in Zeus like in the screenshot below. Keep in mind: at first, you’ll have much more outbound capacity than inbound. That means you can send more than you can receive. Every time you send sats, your outbound goes down and your inbound increases. Eventually, once you’ve got decent inbound, you’ll be able to receive sats and re-balance your channel without needing another on-chain transaction. That, in turn, boosts your outbound again. It may look confusing at first but after you do it a couple of times it starts to make sense. Self custodial lightning is all about managing liquidity. It’s harder to learn but when you master it, you’ll own all your payments and thanks to the built in mobile node of Zeus you’ll have levels of privacy while transaction on par with Monero. And unlike custodial lightning, Zeus can’t rug you. Good luck!

You went down the Zeus rabbit hole, just later to have to hear you did it wrong. And if you vent out in their telegram group they will call you "lazy who don't want to learn" Just use Breez+minibits and you will have zero headaches