I had to send $180 to someone the other day on Ethereum. I looked at the fees and they weren't too high, compared to what they have been.
For example, if you compare them to now, they are almost half.
Anyway, I used MetaMask and used the default gas fees.
I received the dreaded out of gas and paid $0.63 for that privilege.
I then chose the faster speed in MetaMask and sent it along.
You guessed it, it failed! Only cost another $0.91 this time around.
I did the Fast speed one more time as I was short on time.
Another $0.95 down the drain.
Finally, I just decided to do it manual, up the maximum gas paid.
This time the transaction went through, I could have gotten by lowering the gas if I was willing to wait longer, but it was a checkout cart that requires you to send it in a certain time window to complete the transaction.
This relatively small every day style $180 transaction cost me $3.46 in fees and took around 12 minutes start to finish.
I always joke around that ETH is where projects go to die, but this is an atrocious user experience. ETH2 promises to fix this, but who knows when that will go live and if it will in fact fix it.
The fact that many of the current tools cannot properly estimate the gas fees is a big stumbling block. It's one of the reason most of us take Hive for granted. Free fast transaction is an amazing user experience if you can manage to keep it sustainable in some way.