Is there a Lightning gateway that doesn't want to know what my company is?

Signed up for OpenNode expecting the usual email-and-go and got a business information form instead — legal entity, what I sell, expected monthly volume. Not a passport, so it is lighter than a card processor, but it is not nothing and it is not what the board told me to expect.

I only take BTC and I want Lightning because the tickets are small and on-chain fees eat them. Is there anything hosted that does Lightning without the business questions, or is the honest answer that hosted Lightning means an operator, and an operator means questions?

The honest answer is the second one.

A hosted Lightning gateway is a company routing your payments through channels it funded. It has counterparty risk, a jurisdiction, and a compliance function, and all three of those produce the form you just filled in. There is no version of that which does not ask.

Run your own node or accept that you have a provider. Those are the two states.

you wanted lightning and no operator. pick one

Seconding self-host, with the part nobody says out loud: a Lightning node is not a thing you install, it's a thing you operate.

Channels need liquidity on the right side. Inbound is the one that bites — you can have five channels open and still be unable to receive because everything is pushed out. Then there's watchtower coverage, backup of channel state (which is not the same as backing up a seed, and restoring the wrong way costs you the channels), and the fact that if the box goes down mid-force-close you find out what a penalty transaction is.

Zero protocol fee is real and it is the cheapest option on paper. The paper doesn't include your Sunday.

small tickets in btc is the whole problem. take usdt on tron, four cents, no channels, no node.

The customers I have pay in BTC and would not know what Tron is. It is a fair answer to a different question.

NowPayments do lightning also and signup is email only. Fee 0.5 percent not 1.

Is custodial, so you trade the form for a balance somebody else hold. Anyway you already know this.

Correct trade, stated correctly. Most people make it without noticing they made it.