Reaching 700M Active Users, Telegram Announces 'Premium' Tier

"Telegram became one of the top-5 downloaded apps worldwide in 2022 and now has over 700 million monthly active users," they announced this weekend. "This growth is solely from personal recommendations — Telegram has never paid to advertise its apps."

But they add significantly that "As Telegram keeps growing at rocket speed, many users have expressed their will to support our team." And so Telegram is now adding a premium tier, TechCrunch reports. "The firm did not disclose how much it is charging for the premium tier, but the monthly subscription appears to be priced in the range of $5 to $6." The premium tier adds a range of additional and improved features to the messaging app, which topped 500 million monthly active users in January 2021. Telegram Premium enables users to send files as large as 4GB (up from 2GB) and supports faster downloads, for instance, Telegram said. Paying customers will also be able to follow up to 1,000 channels, up from 500 offered to free users, and create up to 20 chat folders with as many as 200 chats each. Telegram Premium users will also be able to add up to four accounts in the app and pin up to 10 chats.

The move is Dubai-headquartered firm's attempt to keep its development "driven primarily by its users, not advertisers," it said. It's also the first time an instant messaging app with hundreds of millions of users has rolled out a premium tier. Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple's Messages and Google's Messages, some of Telegram's top rivals, don't offer a premium tier.

Some analysts had earlier hoped that Telegram would be able to monetize the platform through its blockchain token project. But after several delays and regulatory troubles, Telegram said in 2020 that it had abandoned the project and offered to return $1.2 billion it had raised from investors....

"Today is an important day in the history of Telegram — marking not only a new milestone, but also the beginning of Telegram's sustainable monetization," the firm said in a blog post Sunday.
Premium users will also get animated profile videos and new home screen icons, along with a special chat-list badge, animated stickers, and additional reaction emojis, according to Telegram's blog post. (And of course, no ads.) Telegram's premium tier "will allow us to offer all the resource-heavy features users have asked for over the years," according to the blog post, "while preserving free access to the most powerful messenger on the planet..."

"The contributions of premium subscribers will help improve and expand the app for decades to come, while Telegram will remain free, independent and uphold its users-first values, redefining how a tech company should operate."

I already have enough subscriptions

[rsilvergun]

To streaming services. Every single social media platform is desperate to get me to part with money but to be honest they don't have anything to offer. By and large social media isn't that loss and the sort of person who's engaged enough with it that you might be able to hit them up for money is probably too unstable to provide a steady revenue stream.

Not that there isn't money to be made on social media selling out all the data you accumulate and on advertisements to people who don't know how an effect

Re:I already have enough subscriptions

[AmiMoJo]

Try Cwtch. It's an open source, decentralized chat system that is fully encrypted. It used the Tor network for communication for it's got pretty good anonymity too. I've been testing it out for a while, it works decently well. The only real downside is that messages can be delayed a bit, especially if your phone sleeps. Telegram push notifications are pretty much instant.

Actually there is one other downside. Because it uses Tor it's too heavy for most microcontrollers to use. With Telegram your IoT devices can send notifications. One possible solution is to route everything through Home Assistant instead.

https://cwtch.im/ [cwtch.im]

Re:

[aRTeeNLCH]

I'm willing to bet it has another downside, namely that practically no one is using it... Things are hard enough with Signal, which often does get mentioned in the news and such.

Re:

[dowhileor]

....Twitter is definitely not going to survive that buyout if it goes through. Like most vulture capitalist firms the people putting up the money plan to load up all the debt from the deal back on the Twitter which will cause it to collapse pretty quickly since it's already not profitable....

Then your faith in Elon Musk will be justified?

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Maybe they need to raise money to pay off the million dollars they owe Max Eddy [slashdot.org].

chat service

[phantomfive]

I'd be willing to pay $1 a month for a premium chat service. Anything more than that is pushing it, especially when there are free alternatives. (ie, the only reason I use it is because I can't convince my friends to install a chat client I wrote)

Re:

[thegarbz]

I'm willing to pay nothing for a chat service. I'm willing to pay something for value added features beyond chat.

I'm honestly surprised they haven't put the Bot API behind a paywall yet. That's a service above and beyond normal chat that other services (WhatsApp) charge for.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Seems like you would have to be an extremely heavy user to bother with the premium tier.

Re:

[Powercntrl]

I already pay my mobile provider for a "chat service": SMS. So yeah, the free tier better stay or I'm gone. I'll just put up with the green text bubbles if it means keeping a bit of green in my pocket.

Re: Will they accept Russian customers?

[Ilgaz]

We have to use Telegram in another country because Russians won't use anything else.

Never private

[Duds]

I joined Telegram because of the privacy.

They immediately told everyone who had me in my contacts that I'd joined.

Deleted my account.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How is giving someone your contact information the same thing as consenting to be monitored by the people who you gave your contact information to?

Re:

[thegarbz]

No one is being monitored. You conflate "monitoring" with the Telegram equivalent of when you give someone your phone number they know you have a phone. Whoop de fucking do.

You have a communications system linked to a contact number. It literally has to work that way unless you want to live in a cave.

Re:Never private

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Read the top comment again.

when you give someone your phone number they know you have a phone

doesn't sound to me even remotely similar to

[Telegram] immediately told everyone who had me in my contacts that I'd joined.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Except Telegram also doesn't immediately tell everyone everything. That's just the OP being stupid and facetious. What telegram does do is mark your contact as contactable via telegram if someone installs telegram.

You know... a fundamental fucking function of the program.

Re:Never private

[AmiMoJo]

It's frustrating that you need to supply a phone number to create an account on many services these days. Fortunately you can buy a pre-activated SIM on eBay for a buck around here. Obviously you lose the ability to recover your account if it ever gets lost, but you avoid giving away your real number.

There is also a FOSS version of the client software with some anti-features removed: https://github.com/Telegram-FO... [github.com]

Re:

[Artemis3]

And there is Kotatogram [github.io] to replace Telegram Desktop.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

The greatest trick Telegram ever pulled was convincing people it's a privacy service.

Re:

[hufter]

Signal does that too.

Death by ads

[RegistrationIsDumb83]

Every popular social networks dies off when they start pushing ads and the power users join a new network. Happens like clockwork. The only question is how long until users wise up and switch to an open protocol?

Re:

[dohzer]

Also, if an app or service expects me to pay for ad-free usage, it better be something more useful than a messaging service. I have multiple of those already, mainly SMS and email.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

Signal, and Telegram, have an open protocol. E.g. WhatsApp is using Signal under the hood.

Re: Death by ads

[Ilgaz]

Even being invaded by Russia don't stop .UA and even their president from using it. If we buy Dubai story by owner, why are Russians using it?
They will keep on using it even with ads.

Why ? lol

[bsdetector101]

Why would I even need this ? Got texting.

Mutally assured security...?

[dowhileor]

The logic is,...700M people using both hands to point at 1.4B people who they don't want to talk to is a reason to encrypt a chat service and make it public? On the Web?... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com] So how is this stopping the steal exactly?

Re:

[dowhileor]

the subject is "mutually" i forgot u

Telegram is not the impregnable bastion you think

[NZheretic]

Telegram reportedly surrendered user data to authorities despite insisting '0 bytes' had ever been shared [androidpolice.com]

Der Spiegel reports from sources that Telegram has fulfilled a number of data requests from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office involving terror and child abuse suspects.

Oh, I'm not read to spend my money on such things.

[emmajmm]

Oh, I'm not read to spend my money on such things.... I won't buy this premium for sure.