Some background: I have been accumulating sats on Muun to buy gift cards from Bitrefill to alleviate some of my household expenses.

I faced a problem 

Whenever I thought I had saved enough sats to buy a gift card, I would be rudely slapped by screenshots like the following image. As you can see, the network fee is prohibitively expensive.

Previously, I assumed that it was some bureaucratic procedure by Bitrefill, that I had to invest tons of sats to open up channels between Bitrefill and its stakeholders. This was because I only faced this exorbitant network fee whenever I wanted to buy a $10 worth of voucher. If I want to buy a gift card less than $10, this problem doesn’t exist. 

I subsequently learnt from someone that Muun does an on-chain transaction for every Lightning send, particularly when the transaction is over $10.

So I had made a wrong assumption. The problem was with Muun, not Bitrefill.

Due to this insight, I transferred most of my sats from Muun to Zebedee. 

Zebedee does charge a more modest fee than Muun. Thanks to me switching to Zebedee, I was able to unlock my Bitrefill referral link before 2024 came by! I wrote about my triumph here, if you want to read more about it.

Lesson learnt 

Zebedee > Muun