So yeah. According to my turn of mind, a few sats is a price I'm willing to pay, even if I don't charge anything.
In theory, if you can get your fee policies balanced well, you could get channels to always be balanced due to not being overused in one direction compared to the other; thus always being ready to use (for payments and invoices as well as routing attempts).
Today I went ahead and manually balanced all my channels (which also cost a few hundred sats in routing fees) and immediately routed 6 payments over the day, after weeks with barely any activity.