for personal use, 1-3 channels is plenty. open to a well-connected node (ACINQ, WalletOfSatoshi, or check amboss.space for ranked nodes). 500k-1M sats per channel gives room to send without constant rebalancing.

If you want to earn routing fees you want quite a few channels and you need to keep the balanced. For personal use, 1-2 is fine, familiarize yourself with submarine swaps so you can manually make capacity when you want to. Many nodes won't accept small channels <$50 USD.

For personal use, I would not start by trying to be a routing node. Start with: 1. backup/recovery/watchtower or monitoring sorted first 2. one or two outbound channels funded only with sats you are comfortable locking 3. peers chosen by reliability, fee sanity, public identity, and whether they ro...