Bitcoin Forum

I would like to pay out customers in BTC , what are some of the most cost effective solutions out there ?

Can you give more details about what you're trying to do? What's the nature of your business? Do you already have BTC or you're planning to buy it on a regular basis in order to send payments to your customers?

If you don't want to shoulder the potential price volatility, probably buy the bitcoin a few hours before you're going to need to send out the coins. Unfortunately, we really can't give exchange recommendations without knowing where you're from.

As for sending the coins, Electrum has a bulk payments feature that you can easily take advantage of, so you wouldn't need to send out individual transactions manually.

https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#can-i-do-bulk-payments-with-electrum

Try to use SegWit Bitcoin Wallet Address same with your customer. Then make all transaction by batch so that you can save a lot of transaction fee in one go.

Lightning network is the cheapest way for Bitcoin transaction. But still its under development and you need your own developer to setup this kind of payment system.

GL

Electrum wallet using SegWit address is the best way to send bulk transactions at once.  You can modify the fee into low fees and create a single transaction with several outputs into different addresses.  On the send button box, you can type their addresses and amount on one line, separating them using commas.

You can watch it here the Youtube video tutorial regarding that matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McSVXIJw6FI

Or else, you can use the Lightning network and creating a channel for your micropayments bulk trsanctions and following this thread, Electrum Lightning Network walkthrough (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5259973.0)

I heard also Bitcoin core had this kind of feature but I don't know yet how to use it.

Most services receive payments from their customers not the opposite!
If you are going to send payments to your customers then you can follow the advices from the above replies: use a wallet that allows fees customisation, combine transactions into a single one whenever possible (batching), use segwit addresses, try to release payments on weekends...

If you are going to receive payments from your customers, then your best option is to create a website and integrate a bitcoin payment gateway into it.

use SegWit Bitcoin adddress and ask people to use it.
batch your transactions
Use LN payment
and track bitcin mempool to send payment when fee price are almost low

The more information, the less you pay.

There are many available wallet with lightning feature like electrum, so paying developers for this isn't necessary. OP just need some basic understanding on how to send and receive bitcoin, also some security measures on how to secured its funds while using these wallet softwares.

LN is surely a pretty obvious option here, but I'm not sure if this would be "the solution"; at least for today. Most people simply don't use LN wallets just yet. But I guess OP surely could try to convince(or require) his/her workers to use LN wallets for wage payments?

Maybe do a weekly payout and send your payment on the weekend, since it's usually the time when transaction fees are cheaper than usual, especially if you can't use LN. If possible don't use multiple inputs so you can save some fees. Similar to how signature campaign paid their participans.

Option 1 should be LN payments, but I don't expect that be possible in your case.

Obviously at least you should have SegWit address.
And I'd say that you should somehow keep an "account" for each customer (an entry in the database) with the coins "he has" and only allow them withdraw to their wallet if certain threshold is met (threshold that depends on the tx fees in that month).
And the withdrawals should also be batched, maybe for once a week, in the week-ends, when the fees are usually lower.

Also most people want to receive their payment in their wallets that are usually cold storage and for HODLing. LN is more like a hot wallet that you want to spend from (as a user) and it is unlikely that users would want to keep their payment (of course it depends on the amount of the payment too) in their hot wallet, it is like receiving your salary in your back account (cold storage) or getting it as cash and carry it around in your pocket (LN/hot wallet).

You would install BTCPay Server (https://btcpayserver.org/) on your server hardware which is free, open-source and contrary to the name does not only accept bitcoin payments but also payments in altcoins that you "build" support for (https://docs.btcpayserver.org/Altcoins/).