Cost

Telegram Bot API pricing, and the four costs around it

The Telegram Bot API is free: there is no API key fee, no per-request charge and no charge for webhooks, and a bot can message its users at no cost. Telegram charges only for paid broadcasts above about 30 messages per second, for Gateway verification codes, and indirectly through Stars on digital sales.

The price, before anything else

What you buy	Price	Delivery
Managed hosting and monitoring	$55 / month	billed monthly
Notification and dispatch bots	$3,400	16 calendar days from kickoff
Telegram Stars checkout, added	$1,680	adds about 7 calendar days

Every figure here is a published catalogue price or an add-on at the same day rate the calculator uses. The fixed quote confirms it against your scope.

Telegram Bot API pricing, and the four costs around it: effort, cost and what moves it

Effort in the breakdown below: 4.5 delivery days
Bot API fee: None: no per-request, per-message or webhook charge
Free broadcast rate: About 30 messages per second
Paid broadcasts: 0.1 Stars per message above 30 per second, up to 1,000 per second
Gateway verification code: $0.01 per code (Telegram base price)

As of 2026-09-19, Telegram Bot API 10.3

Why this costs what it costs

People search for Telegram API pricing expecting a rate card like the ones messaging platforms publish, and are reasonably suspicious when there is not one. There is no catch at the level of the API itself. Creating a bot through @BotFather costs nothing, the token costs nothing, and every method a business bot normally uses, from sendMessage to setWebhook to answerCallbackQuery, is called without a meter running. That is a genuine difference from WhatsApp Business, where each conversation is billed.

What Telegram does charge for sits at the edges, and each charge is tied to a specific scale or product decision. The first is speed. A bot can broadcast at roughly 30 messages per second for free, and a list large enough to make that slow can switch on paid broadcasts in @BotFather, which raise the ceiling to 1,000 messages per second and bill 0.1 Stars for every message sent above the free rate. Only bots holding at least 100,000 Stars and serving at least 100,000 monthly active users qualify, so this is a cost a small business will not meet.

The second is identity. Telegram Gateway delivers login and verification codes through Telegram rather than SMS, at a published base price of $0.01 per code. It is a separate product from the Bot API with its own account and its own terms, and those terms say fees accrue when a message is dispatched, so a budget should assume every attempt is billed.

The third is money that passes through the bot. Digital goods and services sold inside Telegram have to be paid in Telegram Stars, and what the seller eventually receives is set by Telegram rather than by the price the buyer sees. Physical goods and services can still go through a card provider, whose fees are the provider's. None of this is a charge for using the API, but all of it belongs in a forecast of what running the bot will cost.

Everything else is the ordinary cost of software: somewhere to run the webhook handler, a database, and someone responsible when it breaks. For most business bots that is the larger and more predictable number, and it is the one this studio actually sets.

Where the effort goes

Work	Days	What it covers
Broadcast queue paced to the free rate	1.5	A sender that stays under about 30 messages per second, honours retry_after on a 429, and retires recipients who blocked the bot, so a campaign finishes without spending anything.
Paid broadcast switch and Stars balance alert	0.5	Only for bots that qualify. The sender raises its rate when paid broadcasts are on, and an alert fires before the Stars balance falls below what the next campaign needs.
Gateway verification flow	1	Sending a code, checking its status and falling back cleanly when the user cannot receive it, with a cap on attempts per number so a retry loop cannot run up the bill.
Stars checkout for digital goods	1	Invoice in XTR, the pre-checkout answer and the successful-payment record, for any bot that sells access, content or credits inside Telegram.
Usage and cost reporting	0.5	One view of messages sent, paid messages, codes dispatched and Stars received, so the Telegram side of the bill is a number you read rather than one you reconstruct.
Total	4.5	Fixed on signature. Scope changes are quoted separately, never absorbed silently.

What moves the number

Bot API methods carry no per-request, per-message or per-webhook fee.

Message volume alone never raises the Telegram bill for a typical bot. A forecast built on a per-message rate copied from another channel will overstate the running cost by the whole of that line.

A bot can broadcast about 30 messages per second for free.

At that pace 100,000 recipients take a little under an hour. For most announcements that is acceptable, and pacing the queue is cheaper than paying to go faster.

Paid broadcasts allow up to 1,000 messages per second, at 0.1 Stars per message above the free 30 per second.

Sending 100,000 messages at the full paid rate bills roughly 9,700 Stars, because almost every message is above the free allowance. The feature requires 100,000 Stars on balance and 100,000 monthly active users.

Telegram Gateway publishes a base price of $0.01 per verification code.

Code delivery through Telegram is usually far cheaper than SMS, but the terms bill on dispatch and allow prices to change, so the flow needs an attempt cap and the budget a margin.

Digital goods and services sold inside Telegram must be paid in Telegram Stars.

A bot selling subscriptions, content or credits cannot route that payment through a card gateway, so Telegram's share of Stars revenue belongs in the margin calculation from the first day.

What year one actually costs

Running cost	Year one	Detail
Managed hosting	$660/yr	Running the webhook handler, database and storage on your own cloud account, with deployments, tested backups and monitoring. This, not the API, is where most of the running cost sits.
Support retainer	$3,480/yr	Keeping the bot current when Telegram ships a Bot API change, and fixing what breaks. Optional, and taken by most clients whose bot handles money or leads.
Paid broadcast Stars	billed by the provider	Only for qualifying bots that choose to send faster than the free rate. Billed by Telegram from the bot's own Stars balance, and only for messages delivered successfully.
Gateway verification codes	billed by the provider	Billed by Telegram per code dispatched, on a Gateway account that belongs to you. The volume follows sign-ups and logins, not message traffic.
Cloud infrastructure	billed by the provider	Billed by your provider directly. For a business bot that sleeps between messages this is a few dollars a month, and often nothing at all.

Buying the same thing elsewhere

Where you buy it	What the money buys	What you carry
The Bot API, called directly	The whole platform at no API cost, a token you own, and every feature Telegram ships on the day it ships. This is what we build on.	Someone has to write and run the code, which is the cost on the rest of this page. The API being free does not make the bot free.
A bot-builder subscription	A visual editor on top of the same free API, with hosting included and nothing to deploy.	The platform charges for what Telegram gives away, usually per subscriber or per month, so the bill grows with the audience. Exporting the bot later is rarely possible.
The Telegram API for user accounts (MTProto)	Also free, and able to do things a bot cannot, such as acting as a person in chats the account has joined.	It automates a user account rather than a bot, which is the wrong tool for customer messaging and puts the account at risk if it is used to send at volume.

Questions about the money

Is the Telegram Bot API free?

Yes. Creating a bot, getting a token and calling the API cost nothing, and Telegram states that bots can message their users at no cost. The charges that exist are for optional features above a scale most bots never reach, or for separate products such as Gateway.

Do I need to pay for a Telegram API key?

No. A bot token comes free from @BotFather in under a minute, and the api_id used by the user-account API is free as well. Nobody legitimate sells either.

How much does it cost to send 100,000 messages from a Telegram bot?

Nothing, if the bot sends at the free rate of about 30 per second, which takes a little under an hour. With paid broadcasts at the full 1,000 per second it takes under two minutes and bills about 9,700 Stars.

Is the Telegram Bot API cheaper than the WhatsApp Business API?

For messaging, yes. WhatsApp bills businesses per conversation, while a Telegram bot pays nothing per message. The comparison that matters is the rest of the decision, mainly which app your customers already use.

What does Telegram take from payments made in a bot?

For physical goods paid by card, nothing: the provider's fees apply. Digital goods must be sold for Stars, and the amount a seller receives for them is set by Telegram, so check the current figure in the Stars terms before pricing a product.

Then what does a Telegram bot actually cost?

The build and the running of it, which are ordinary software costs. Our published prices are fixed per bot type, and hosting for a typical bot costs a few dollars a month in infrastructure.