For Alby Hub to work, you need a channel to send and receive funds. It was my understanding that if you already had established channels, then you wouldn’t need to open a channel for it to function. Sounds like you didn’t have any channels opened so your sats went to purchase liquidity rather than actually open a channel. What is your sending and receiving capability? I’d assume it’s more than 18k in sats. This may also be a monthly fee so you might check on that and get out now if you have no interest in Lightning.

My experience with Alby Hub has been completely different but I had a good idea about how it worked before installing it. I loaded it on a second node and opened a channel from my primary node to the Alby Hub Node and it the only thing it cost was the channel opening fees.

Good luck. Hate to hear you have no interest in Lightning. Still glad to see you here on NOSTR. Have a great day. 🤙🏻☕️