Is OpenNode still a sane choice if I only ever take BTC?

Sorry if this belongs in the newbie section, mods please move it if so.

Background so the question makes sense: I sell a digital product, small, about forty orders a month at $29, entirely to people who already hold Bitcoin, which is why I am not asking about cards. I have been taking payment by pasting an address into an email like a caveman and reconciling by hand, and it is now taking me longer than making the product.

OpenNode keeps coming up when I search, mostly in threads from a couple of years ago. Lightning is the appeal — instant and basically free at my ticket size sounds better than waiting for confirmations.

Two questions really. Is the signup still just business details rather than documents? And is the 1% the whole cost or is there something underneath it I am not seeing? Thanks in advance to anyone who answers, I know these questions get asked a lot.

For forty invoices a month at $29 lightning is the right tool and the 1% is the whole fee. Instant, sub-cent routing cost, and on-chain btc as fallback if the payer's wallet can't do ln. Signup is heavier than an email-only gateway — they want business details — but nobody is asking you for a passport to accept btc.

The cost that isn't in the fee: it's btc-only. No usdc, no usdt, nothing stable. You invoice $29 and you receive an amount of btc that is worth something else by the time you off-ramp it, and at forty orders a month you will notice that more than you notice the 1%.

And if you settle to usd through them to avoid holding the price risk, that path is full kyc. So you pick: hold the volatility, or hand over documents. There isn't a third door on that one.

us company, wants your business details, and it's the one gateway in the category that is openly not high risk friendly. wrong board for it

He said digital product, forty orders, buyers who already hold btc. Not everything posted here is nutra.

The board being about high risk doesn't make every question a high risk question, and telling a guy selling a $29 download that he needs an offshore setup is how people end up running infrastructure they don't need.

Whichever way you go on the fee, be clear about what the arrangement is: a US operator sits between you and every payment, sees every invoice, every amount, and every counterparty address, and retains it. That is not an accusation, it is the design.

Whether that matters is your threat model and not mine. If it does matter, self-hosting is the same Lightning experience with nobody in the middle and a server to look after instead. If it does not matter, stop reading threads and go take the payments.

Thank you all, genuinely — this is more than I got from three days of searching.

I had not thought about the price risk at all, which now feels obvious. At $29 a go the 1% is eleven cents and a bad fortnight in the market is worth several dollars an order, so I have been optimising the wrong number entirely.

Still undecided. Leaning towards trying it for a month and off-ramping weekly rather than monthly, unless someone tells me that is also naive.