Telegram will soon start charging for some of its features (via TechCrunch). In a message on the platform, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that a paid Telegram Premium subscription will be available later this month, giving users “extra features, speed, and resources.”
Durov teases some of the benefits of the membership, such as early access to new features, larger file uploads, and Premium-only stickers and comments (which were recently previewed in a beta version of the app).
However, Durov makes it clear that Telegram’s present functionality will remain free, and that the new features will have no impact on the app’s experience for free users. Non-subscribers will still be able to view and interact with Premium stickers and reactions, as well as the larger files posted by Premium users.
Durov wrote on his telegram channel” Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we’ve been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled.
And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone.
After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That’s why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first.
Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don’t subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way.
While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority”.
As Durov explains, a Premium subscription will help the service cover some of the costs associated with raising the “already crazy” limits on file sizes, chats, and media, which would be “unmanageable” if made available to all users. A paid subscription has been in the works for some time, with Durov initially hinting at it in 2020.
Although the exact scope of Premium features is unknown, it appears that the subscription will appeal to Telegram’s power users, similar to how Twitter Blue provides extra capabilities to the app’s most frequent users. According to information obtained from the beta version of the app, it will cost $4.99 a month and will include features such as speedier downloads, voice-to-text messages, chat customization options, and more.
Premium users will not see ads in one-to-many channels, according to the beta, which Durov introduced last year. This is in line with Durov’s previous promise to provide a way for users to turn off ads, though it appears that you may have to pay to get access.
Durov doesn’t seem to have plans to expand ads beyond public channels, despite the initiative being “more successful” than what he initially thought. “I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers,” Durov says in his post. “This way our users will always remain our main priority.” Of course, this outlook probably also depends on whether Telegram can entice a large enough chunk of its more than 500 million users to buy into Premium.
