100,000 seems high, I remember being able to get started with like $5. You may be in the "purchase channel" section, Instead just go to lightning -> receive and it will say "blah blah there's a setup fee" but you can do it for much smaller amounts. The fee should be something like $1, not $100.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but that's the price for self-custody right now unfortunately.
No, 100k isn't the fee, it's the inbound channel capacity. It's probably going to cost about 7k-10k sats for that inbound channel.
Yeah you don't need to buy a massive inbound channel. The only reason to do that is if you expect to be receiving significantly more than you spend. In which case boltz.exchange or other solutions to empty your channels are a better deal.
I bought the 500k inbound channel for 15k sats, and sent 200k sats to the channel giving me 200k outbound capacity against a remaining 300k inbound. That's been pretty solid for me. It's been running great for the past two and a half months.
