Everyone thinks they're being rug-pulled into a subscription; they don't understand the ease with which you can add alby hub to a node you run yourself and have nothing change

I totally get you. Setting up Alby Hub was very simple though, and I don't pay anything. I just run it on the same 10 year old machine on which I run my BTC node. It doesn't seem to affect or take up resources significantly and I have one channel that doesn't represent any work (at least until now). Opening that one channel was excessively expensive since it's just for the zaps here, and it was *not* something I would have done had I known better -- I blame their poor onboarding for it. But I think you're savvy enough to save yourself that type of problem.