Telegram to launch paid subscription plan this month

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said in a post on his Telegram channel that the popular messaging app will launch Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. 

Telegram Premium features such as the ability to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, and to tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way will also be offered to even users who don’t subscribe to Telegram Premium. All existing Telegram features remain free. 

“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,” Durov said.

“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,” he added. 

Telegram currently has 500 million monthly active users and is one of the 10 most downloaded apps in the world according to its website.

The exact details of all the features that will be included in Premium and its pricing were not detailed in Durov’s post.