Alby Hub is one of the best innovations in lighting, but I can't recommend it.

As a podcaster, inbound public channel capacity is critical. Alby Hub's current providers are poorly peered to the Podcasting 2.0 ecosystem, Boltz, The Bitcoin Company, and many other popular Lightning companies and ecosystems.

It is helpful that Alby has picked some inbound liquidity providers we can quickly start with. However, for some use cases, like Podcasting 2.0, those pre-selected providers need to be better peered.

This forces the user to attempt to find new ways to obtain inbound liquidity, which is nearly impossible at worst in Alby Hub and a non-obvious, non-discoverable workflow at best.

The problem is that when you need inbound liquidity beyond the pre-selected providers, Alby Hub becomes a costly chore. The user is forced to spray and pray SATs outbound, hoping they go out the right channel, in an attempt to move SATs to the receiving side of the channel.

This is where the current tooling in Alby Hub hits a critical failure, making it impossible to recommend it to others.

1. There is no UI to open channels to inbound providers beyond the pre-selected ones.
2. There is no UI for selecting which channel outbound payment(s) gets sent - so manually rebalancing is a tedious, expensive game.
3. Those two problems combine with no tooling to re-balance the channels.

The result is that Alby Hub only works for podcasters after extensive effort and cost to get inbound liquidity working.

That can be a challenge for any lightning Node, but since there is no UI, no tools, and nothing at all to manage channels besides opening and closing them, it is extremely difficult in Alby Hub to resolve issues. I assume this will be critical for users as they increasingly use their Alby Hub and sats move to the other side of a channel.

Even after a week of trying to get sats on the receiving side, most large inbound transactions fail to reach my node.

With a typical self-hosted Node, one can use Lightning Terminal or any channel management tool, but this is not possible with Alby Hub Cloud. Any basic channel management would have saved me significant revenues this week and hours and hours of troubleshooting failed payments.