Telegram will start a paid subscription later this month

Until now, the messaging app Telegram was completely free. But this is set to change this month: As announced by founder Pavel Durov, he wants to introduce the paid subscription Telegram Premium.

Sooner or later, many digital offers will reach this point – now the time has come for the Telegram messenger service. As founder Pavel Durov announced in a blog post, Telegram wants to introduce a paid subscription later this month.

What is Telegram Premium?

According to founder Durov, Telegram offers an “unrivaled” range of limits for chats, media and file uploads. For example, users can send data with a size of almost two GB in the app. For comparison: competitor WhatsApp complains about videos that exceed a limit of 64 MB.

Nevertheless, Telegram users are apparently not satisfied with the existing limits. As Durov writes, many have asked for “the current limits to be raised even further”. That’s why Telegram “after careful consideration” decided to offer the increased limits via a paid subscription.

Telegram Premium is scheduled to launch later this month. Here users should be able to book “additional functions, speed and resources”. For all users who decide against the Telegram Premium payment subscription, nothing should change.

Durov writes that “all existing features remain free”. They can also view extra-large documents, media, and stickers from premium users

Telegram Premium: Why did Telegram choose an affordable one?

As is so often the case, the decision to go with Telegram Premium is also a question of money.

If we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable – then unfortunately the party would be over for everyone.

Telegram has experimented with “privacy-friendly advertising” in the past. And that was more successful than expected.

However, according to Durov, Telegram should “primarily be funded by its users and not by advertisers”. So the users would always remain the “main priority” of the messaging app.

How popular is Telegram?

In terms of user numbers, Telegram is far from being able to keep up with its competitor WhatsApp. In February 2020, the Meta subsidiary was able to break the mark of two billion monthly active users for the first time.

Telegram, on the other hand, only had a quarter in January 2021. In that month, the app had 500 million monthly active users.

But if you look at the development of the numbers, a positive trend is clearly visible. Because since December 2014, the number of monthly active users of Telegram has increased tenfold.

However, it remains to be seen what influence the paid subscription plans will have on the development of user numbers.

Also interesting: