Telegram launches “Telegram Premium”, celebrates 700 million monthly active users

Telegram now counts 700 million monthly active users, and is among the top-5 downloaded apps worldwide in 2022. The company claims “this growth is solely from personal recommendations” and that it has never promoted the Telegram app. The Instant-Messaging service now says it is launching “Telegram Premium,” a subscription-based service that gives users access to exclusive additional features.

This comes just a few days after the company announced it was launching a new subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed, and resources. We reported that Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, said a lot of users were asking for more features such as unrivaled limits on chats, media, and file uploads, which is the reason behind the Premium service.

Some of the notable features include a larger maximum file upload size, faster downloads, more channels, and unique new stickers. 

The current limit on file size uploads is 2GB, but Premium users can send files up to 4GB in size, handy for folks who send a lot of video or large ZIP files (all users can download those extra-large documents). Paid users will also be able to download media and files at their full network speeds, rather than seeing restricted speeds. 

The Premium plan also doubles limits, letting you follow up to 1,000 channels, create up to 20 chat folders with 200 chats each, add a fourth account to any Telegram app, pin 10 chats, and save up to 10 favorite stickers. And users will get unique stickers with full-screen animations visible to all users, along with unique reactions.

Other features include voice-to-text transcriptions, chat management, longer bios, animated profile pictures, more characters for media captions, 400 favorite GIFs, up to 20 public t.me links, premium badges and app icons, and an ad-free experience. 

Telegram didn’t state how much users are to pay for the premium tier, but the monthly subscription appears to be priced in the range of $4.99 to $6.

The premium tier adds a range of additional and improved features to the messaging app, which topped 500 million monthly active users in January 2021.

The company also unveiled several new features for all users, such as verification badges for public figures and organisations, join requests for public groups, improved bots, improved chat previews on Android, improved external sharing on iOS, and more. The update is rolling out gradually, so if you don’t see it now, “the new version will become available soon,” Telegram noted.