Telegram Premium to launch later this month

Telegram is launching a premium service later this month. According to Pavel Durov, Telegram founder in a post on his telegram channel, the messaging company’s premium service will be “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 adds that all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Some of the new features include the ability to view extra-large documents, more media and stickers ad more.

Though Durov did not mention the subscription rate for the Premium service, aata gathered from the beta version of the app suggests it will cost $4.99 / month and will come with faster downloads, voice-to-text messages, tools to customize your chats, and more.

Durov said that the reason that the Premium version was introduced was due to the fact that a lot of people were asking for the great features on the platform such as it unrivalled limits on chats, media and file uploads. He added that “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.”

Recently the messaging app announced that its users can now send crypto through the platform after its introduction of a new feature, ‘Wallet bot’ which enables its users to buy its native cryptocurrency Toncoin) within its messaging app.

As at this time last year, Telegram joined elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally.