A paid Telegram Premium subscription is now available for the popular cross-platform messaging service. After a little over a month of beta testing, Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov has announced that the new Telegram Premium paid service will offer advantages like “additional features, speed and resources.” That includes things like extra-large stickers and larger documents. Existing Telegram users that don’t want any of the changes shouldn’t need to worry,
Telegram has been planning to monetize its platform for a while now, with company founder Pavel Durov outright saying back in 2020 that the company’s current business model wasn’t sustainable and that paid features would be coming soon.
The first step in Telegram’s monetization strategy was rolling out ads last year, targeting businesses and power users. However, this didn’t go over well with the Telegram community, and the company has since been looking for other ways to generate revenue.
This shows that Telegram Premium would deliver new functionality for those willing to pay for it. Telegram’s former slogan “free forever” has also been recently changed to “free unlimited cloud storage for the chats and media” in the code for upcoming app version. Durov’s announcement today confirms this change.
In his post to his own Telegram Channel, Durov says that Telegram Premium will be a subscription plan with benefits like “additional features, speed, and resources. Leaks about Telegram’s upcoming premium features טלגראס ישראל suggest that it will offer users 4GB of storage for uploads, faster download speeds, no ads, unique reactions, premium stickers, animated avatars, and a profile badge. Durov has not mentioned pricing for Telegram Premium yet, but leaks suggest it could be $4.99 a month. He did confirm that all existing features will remain free and that not all future features will be locked behind a paywall.
we’re seeing some new features in the Telegram Premium beta, which include custom avatars and stickers, as shown in the image above. Durov didn’t give any indication of when this new subscription service will be available to the public. We’ve reached out to Telegram for more information on what features will be included in the subscription, as well as for a date of availability and final pricing, but we haven’t received a response yet.
Durov made the case for a paid subscription by saying that the demand for higher limits on chats, media, and files would have made traffic and hosting costs unmanageable for the service. However, making it a paid option would allow those that need it to use it, and Durov said that the company would prefer to be “funded primarily by its users, not advertisers,” so that users remain the priority.
Telegram was recently accused of providing customer data to German authorities, despite the company’s insistence that it has never disclosed any user data to third parties.
