Youre not so much paying "them" to use the wallet, as the on chain fee to open a multisig channel to use sats on the lightning network.

And as far as I know a lot of these wallet solutions, unless you are directly running your own nodes, are never really fully non custodial.

Hit a wall, retreat and recollect. No shame in that. And I could be wrong. Think of all the progress we've all made from our first BTC transactions off an exchange.