If you want more features, get ready to pay: CEO Pavel Durov introduces Telegram Premium

Telegram is one of the other messaging apps, besides WhatsApp and Signal, that’s quite popular particularly for the presence of channels. When WhatsApp landed itself in a spot of trouble in India due to the whole misunderstanding regarding E2EE encryption in private and Business chats, Telegram, along with Signal, got quite a boost.

Now, as CEO Pavel Durov pointed out in his latest blog, it’s almost been nine years since Telegram was launched. And there’s more on the cards.

“We've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app… to this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled,” Durov wrote.

“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,” Durov added.

The CEO went on to write that after giving things “some thought”, they have come to the conclusion that the only way to let users get more features, while keeping the existing ones still 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,” Durov explained.

For those who are not looking to pay anything, all of Telegram’s existing features will remain free and Durov said that there are “plenty of new free features coming”. Non-premium users will also be able to enjoy some Premium benefits like viewing 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 Durov’s blog does not list out all the benefits Premium users will get, it seems like some specialised stickers, reactions, and options to send heavier files than normal are definitely on the cards. The CEO also explained why they decided to bring in this Premium tier.

“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 said.

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