- Free messaging app Telegram will introduce a paid subscription plan this month, the app's founder Pavel Durov said on Friday, Jun 10, 2022.){kind=link}
Tech (The Times Groupe)- Free messaging app Telegram will introduce a paid subscription plan this month, the app’s founder Pavel Durov said on Friday, Jun 10, 2022.
Telegram Premium users will have a higher limit for chats, media, and file uploads, Durov said in a blogpost.
Pavel Durov revealed yesterday that the company will be launching a paid offering later this month that will go above and beyond the current free offering – essentially a premium offer – without affecting existing features for free users (not paying).
Last month, a rumor started spreading across the internet that Telegram was going to launch a paid tier, and on Friday, Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder and CEO, confirmed that this is indeed going to happen.
Telegram Premium, as it will be called, will launch before the end of the month. However, before you worry, note that all of the current free features will remain free. Additionally, there are new features coming to the free tier in the near future.
According to Durov, Telegram Premium will allow “anyone” to acquire additional features, speed, and resources. Furthermore, Telegram users will be able to “support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first”. Some Telegram Premium benefits will be accessible even to users who don’t subscribe, such as viewing extra-large documents, media, and stickers sent by Premium users, or tapping to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way.
According to Durov’s announcement, which he posted on Telegram of course, the company’s ad experiments in public channels have been more successful than they had anticipated. However, even with that success, Durov thinks the service should primarily be funded by its users and not advertisers, to ensure that users remain the company’s main priority.
Here is what Pavel 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.