Telegram introducing paid subscription plan in June 2022, offers higher limits for chats & media uploads

Existing features will remain free.

Fiona Tan | June 12, 2022, 04:51 PM

Follow us on Telegram for the latest updates: https://t.me/mothershipsg

Telegram will be launching a paid subscription plan in June 2022.

Telegram Premium

The plan will be called Telegram Premium, as announced by the app's founder Pavel Durov on June 10.

Under this subscription plan, users can enjoy higher limits for chats, media and file uploads, as well as other additional features and resources.

The messaging app's existing features remains free to use, said Durov, who added that there will be "plenty" more free features to come.

Users remain "main priority"

The raising of limits have been widely requested by many users, said Durov, who added that it is not without its challenges.

Most prominently, removing limits for all Telegram users would result in "unmanageable" cost for the application's server and traffic.

Through Telegram Premium's paid subscription, users will be able acquire addition features and resources.

At the same time, it ensures that the application remains funded primarily by its users and not advertisers, Durov explained.

You can read Durov's full announcement below:

Since the day Telegram was launched almost nine 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.

Follow Mothership on Telegram?

It's free to subscribe.

And you'll also get the latest news and updates.

Click here to join.

Congratulations on making it to the end of this article. According to our data, only one in seven readers actually make it all the way until the end. That makes you different. The sort who likes to consume such content. And possibly create your own. For us. The type of content to get more of our readers to stick till the end. Want to write for us? Check this out.

Top image by Christian Wiediger from Unsplash