End-User fees
The Breez SDK is free for developers. There are small fees for end-users to send and receive payments.
- Sending Lightning Payments
- Receiving Lightning Payments
- Sending to a BTC Address
- Receiving from a BTC Address
Note: The SDK uses Liquid confidential transactions. This means a discount v-size is used to calculate transaction fees. For more details, see ELIP-200.
Sending Lightning Payments
Sending Lightning payments involves a submarine swap and two Liquid on-chain transactions. The process is as follows:
- User broadcasts an L-BTC transaction to a Liquid lockup address.
- Swapper pays the invoice, sending to the recipient, and then gets a preimage.
- Swapper broadcasts an L-BTC transaction to claim the funds from the Liquid lockup address.
The fee a user pays to send a Lightning payment is composed of three parts:
- Lockup Transaction Fee: ~34 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- Claim Transaction Fee: ~19 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- Swap Service Fee: 0.1% fee on the amount sent.
Note: swap service fee is dynamic and can change. Currently, it is 0.1%.
Example: If the user sends 10k sats, the fee would be:
- 34 sats [Lockup Transaction Fee] + 19 sats [Claim Transaction Fee] + 10 sats [Swapper Service Fee] = 63 sats
Receiving Lightning Payments
Receiving Lightning payments involves a reverse submarine swap and requires two Liquid on-chain transactions. The process is as follows:
- Sender pays the Swapper invoice.
- Swapper broadcasts an L-BTC transaction to a Liquid lockup address.
- SDK claims the funds from the Liquid lockup address and then exposes the preimage.
- Swapper uses the preimage to claim the funds from the Liquid lockup address.
The fee a user pays to receive a Lightning payment is composed of three parts:
- Lockup Transaction Fee: ~27 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- Claim Transaction Fee: ~20 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- Swap Service Fee: 0.25% fee on the amount received.
Note: swap service fee is dynamic and can change. Currently, it is 0.25%.
Example: If the sender sends 10k sats, the fee for the end-user would be:
- 27 sats [Lockup Transaction Fee] + 20 sats [Claim Transaction Fee] + 25 sats [Swapper Service Fee] = 72 sats
Sending to a BTC Address
Sending to a BTC address involves a trustless chain swap, 2 Liquid on-chain transactions, and 2 BTC on-chain transactions. The process is as follows:
- SDK broadcasts an L-BTC transaction to a Liquid lockup address.
- Swapper broadcasts a BTC transaction to a Bitcoin lockup address.
- Recipient claims the funds from the Bitcoin lockup address.
- Swapper claims the funds from the Liquid lockup address.
The fee to send to a BTC address is composed of four parts:
- L-BTC Lockup Transaction Fee: ~34 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- BTC Lockup Transaction Fee: the swapper charges a mining fee based on the current bitcoin mempool usage.
- Swap Service Fee: 0.1% fee on the amount sent.
- BTC Claim Transaction Fee: the SDK fees to claim BTC funds to the destination address, based on the current Bitcoin mempool usage.
Note: swap service fee is dynamic and can change. Currently, it is 0.1%.
Example: If the user sends 100k sats, the mining fees returned by the Swapper are 2000 sats, and the claim fees for the user are 1000 sats—the fee would be:
- 34 sats [Lockup Transaction Fee] + 2000 sats [BTC Claim Transaction Fee] + 100 sats [Swapper Service Fee] + 1000 sats [BTC Lockup Transaction Fee] = 3132 sats
Receiving from a BTC Address
Receiving from a BTC address involves a trustless chain swap, 2 Liquid on-chain transactions, and 2 BTC on-chain transactions.
The process is as follows:
- Sender broadcasts a BTC transaction to the Bitcoin lockup address.
- Swapper broadcasts an L-BTC transaction to a Liquid lockup address.
- SDK claims the funds from the Liquid lockup address.
- Swapper claims the funds from the Bitcoin lockup address.
The fee to receive from a BTC address is composed of three parts:
- L-BTC Claim Transaction Fee: ~20 sats (0.1 sat/discount vbyte).
- BTC Claim Transaction Fee: the swapper charges a mining fee based on the Bitcoin mempool usage at the time of the swap.
- Swapper Service Fee: the swapper charges a 0.1% fee on the amount received.
Note: swapper service see is dynamic and can change. Currently, it is 0.1%.
Example: If the sender sends 100k sats and the mining fees returned by the Swapper are 2000 sats—the fee for the end-user would be:
- 20 sats [Claim Transaction Fee] + 100 sats [Swapper Service Fee] + 2000 sats [BTC Claim Transaction Fee] = 2120 sats