Not really, unless you count the period that blocks weren't full when you could even send transactions without a fee.
Fees today are about 100 sat/b, a multiple of that in times of congestion and lower in the weekends. You never have to pay 1000 sat/b, but you are of course free to subsidize miners however you want. This is roughly the same the fees were in 2013, only that those satoshis of yours are worth so much more USD now.
That isn't the whole truth, and those spikes in fees come more often now and spike higher, but the minimum fee to get into a block averaged over a year isn't that much worse now than in 2013.
That probably isn't very helpful if you need to transact in times of congestion, or make low value transactions, but it's important to know that netiher 1 nor 1000 sat/b has been reality for some time now, and that you should never talk about fees in USD because that doesn't describe how it works.
Another common mistake is to include the value of the transaction when describing fees which misleads people into thinking fees are a percentage of the value transacted which is not the case.
Fees today are about 100 sat/b, a multiple of that in times of congestion and lower in the weekends. You never have to pay 1000 sat/b, but you are of course free to subsidize miners however you want. This is roughly the same the fees were in 2013, only that those satoshis of yours are worth so much more USD now.
That isn't the whole truth, and those spikes in fees come more often now and spike higher, but the minimum fee to get into a block averaged over a year isn't that much worse now than in 2013.
That probably isn't very helpful if you need to transact in times of congestion, or make low value transactions, but it's important to know that netiher 1 nor 1000 sat/b has been reality for some time now, and that you should never talk about fees in USD because that doesn't describe how it works.
Another common mistake is to include the value of the transaction when describing fees which misleads people into thinking fees are a percentage of the value transacted which is not the case.