Announcement: Over the past few weeks, we've been doing a lot of work on the fee algorithm that Counterparty uses, and now transactions are effectively much cheaper than before. In particular, 'send' transactions can store all of their Counterparty metadata in a 40-byte OP_RETURN output, and you cit sounds all good an now specify the exact fees paid for each transaction, as well as the default fee-per-KB amount, dust sizes, and so on. Multi-sig outputs need not be used, so no difficult-to-spend funds need to be sent back to your self at all.

This transaction is an example of a modern send transaction that cost only US $0.01 in fees, with a $0.03 output to the destination. It was constructed and broadcast with the following command: counterpartyd.py send --source=SOURCE --destination=DEST --quantity=1 --asset=XCP --encoding='opreturn' --fee=.00002, and it was confirmed almost immediately. If you're moving lots of assets around, or sending one asset to many users, you can use this script to automate the process and keep costs as low as possible.