Privacy enthusiasts LOVE Telegram. It’s the perfect alternative to WhatsApp and TG does a lot of things right, for free. But how does Telegram make money? What’s the business model that powers their growth and helps them keep their business running if the app is free?

In this article, let’s understand the revenue model for this privacy-focused chat application – Telegram.

How does Telegram make money?

Telegram is a not-for-profit application and does not make any money. The company is entirely funded by its founder Pavel Durov. And according to their FAQs, if they run out of funding, they plan to implement non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and pay developer salaries.

Also read: How does Signal make money? [Easily Explained]

What is Telegram and what makes it so special?

Telegram is a chat app that was built to ensure utmost privacy compliance and complete data security. Their iOS and Android apps were built during the year 2013. With a lot of additional features like file storage, cloud chat backups, and more.

Its regular users, swear by it. Telegram is the perfect combination of blending a simple chat application with loads of developer and group-friendly features.

When you think of WhatsApp, you think of chatting with individual friends.

Telegram has a group and community-focus and the same can be seen in the many features including the high group user limits, chatbots, advanced group management, and more.

With Telegram, you can create groups of upto 200,000 users! That’s an astonishing number to say the least! Along with that, no matter how many groups, chats, and users you maintain, the app takes almost no space on your phone.

That is because of Telegram’s powerful cache and cloud-management

How does Telegram work and what features does it offer?

Telegram works in a very similar manner to most chat applications on the play store. The main difference is how they securely store your chats on the cloud.

Telegram offers virtually unlimited storage for your chats and media files when stored on the cloud.

Here are some of the main features that Telegram banks upon:

• Easy to use and build apps on – The developers have built the UI to be very easy for even first-time users. Coming from another Chat app, Telegram will seem like a familiar environment
• Focus on privacy – Telegram encrypts all messages with the highest security protocols available and can also self-destruct if required
• Sync between all devices – Telegram is available on all major platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. Your data automatically syncs across all platforms.
• Open-source APIs – One of the reasons why people loved Telegram was the ease with which you can create bots using their APIs. With these APIs, you can virtually automate most of the chat and group tasks.
• Lots of emojis and stickers – With a community focus, and a lot of built-in stickers ad emojis, Telegram is one heck of a social platform.

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What is the revenue model of Telegram?

Telegram is a not-for-profit chat application. The founders of the company never planned to make any profits out of the application. But, they still require funding to keep their infrastructure operational.

And Pavel Durov, who shares the vision of Telegram with the founders, has funded the started to last long enough to keep the application running.

How does Telegram make money at present?

Currently, Telegram makes no money. The funding from Pavel keeps the company operational. While the money is enough for the company to last for a while, if they run out of funding, they plan to introduce non-essential paid options to generate profits.

The founders started the company out of love for the community and for a cause. The idea became viral and to keep up with the infrastructure demands to support the millions of users that joined the company, they had to rethink their operational model.

How does Telegram plan to earn money in the future?

While the company states that they have enough funding to last for quite a while now, they will soon be looking to either raise more funding, or find ways to monetize Telegram from its users.

One of the possibilities is with the use of cosmetic addons that their users can purchase as a donation to Telegram.

This business model has been used by Discord and it has seen a lot of success. Telegram can make use of the same to earn similar or even greater success depending on their execution of the idea.

Why do users love Telegram?

Telegram is built around a cause – a pain point that users felt.

When chat and social media apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and others came out, privacy enthusiasts felt a pinch with all the data that they had to supply to simply communicate.

And since everyone was using them, a lot of the privacy-focused users felt pressed into sharing their data with these companies.

Telegram’s founders were part of the privacy and decided to do something about it. They built the application and shared it within the community.

The result was a wide acceptance of the app in a surprisingly short period. And as the founders of the app were threads of the same community, the app fit seamlessly with the expectations of the users.

And with that, began Telegram’s journey into the crowded chat apps market!

Final words…

I hope you enjoyed this short read on Telegram’s current and future potential revenue sources. Drop a like or share this article across to someone who would enjoy reading this up – we’d appreciate it!