Telegram Stories Launched as a Paid Service But Free Users Can Expect Access Later

Telegram has officially launched its Stories feature to the public, following a successful Beta program last month. However, upon learning that this feature was exclusively for paid subscribers, I became curious and decided to investigate its unique aspects and why CEO Pavel Durov chose to monetise it.

While the new Telegram update does offer some interesting features, they might not be compelling enough to justify a paywall. Some users have mentioned the presence of mood lighting and a unique jiggle animation at the beginning of the stories.

However, what caught my attention, even more, was the update about the upcoming additions to Telegram stories, as shared by Telegram Info, @tginfo. This suggests that free users will also gain access to these features in the future. This development is likely to make Telegram Stories more appealing to a wider audience.

15 Amazing Things I Discovered About Telegram Stories

1. Telegram Stories will have the function of recording from the main and front cameras at the same time.
2. It will be possible to tag people in stories (@username). Marked users will receive notifications of such mentions.
3. Unfinished stories can be sent as drafts.
4. Stories can have a text caption.
5. The ability to control the lifetime of the story, which I confirmed in a tweet by Alessandro Antonucci @techworldaleant. Although the report noted that some options will only be available to Premium users.
6. Stories can be archived and returned from the archive.
7. Stories can be pinned to a profile before they are manually deleted.
8. Stories can use custom emoji, and when used, a button will be displayed to save the emoji pack to yourself.
9. Most likely, stories can be edited after they are published. This one blew my mind. Lol!
10. There will be a limit on the number of stories posted per 24 hours.
11. The owner of the story will be able to see the list of views (this list will disappear 24 hours after the history is deleted). The right to restrict downloads, screenshots, and screen recording when viewing history.
12. Stories privacy: list of close friends, for everyone, for contacts. If the story is only available to close friends, list members will be notified when they are added to the list.
13. There will be a separate feature that allows you to turn off responses to stories, privately reply to stories, forward (forward) stories, and enable notifications of new stories.
14. Stories can be zoomed in by pinching the screen.
15. Telegram will offer to enable notifications of new stories from those 5 users with whom you communicate most often. All information is based on strings from the translation platform, so the story mechanism may undergo some changes by the release.

Telegram seems determined to revolutionise the concept of Stories on social media platforms. This may be why Durov initially expressed hesitation about adding the feature to Telegram.

As of now, only Premium users have the capability to publish stories. However, the report hinted that free users will likely gain access to this feature at a later time. These speculations indicate that Telegram Stories might be undergoing a second-stage test and could potentially be made available to the general public in the future.