Your platform has two Telegram features with similar names, and they serve completely different people. Get them straight once and a whole category of confusion goes away.
Telegram Chat: a channel for your customers
This is the customer facing product. Their business messages its own audience on Telegram.
What it covers:
- Bulk campaigns with text up to 4,096 characters, photos, documents and video.
- Reusable templates, inline link buttons and quick reply keyboards, with a live preview while composing.
- A shared inbox for two way conversations, with agent assignment and permissions.
- Sending through the developer API once it is enabled on the account.
Setup is unusual in a good way: the business creates its own bot through Telegram’s BotFather and pastes the token in. The platform registers and maintains the inbound webhook from there. No carrier, no sender ID, no template approval queue.
Telegram Notifications: alerts for you
This is the operations plugin. It sends platform alerts to admins over Telegram: low balance warnings, application monitoring, new sender name requests, SMPP session alerts, support ticket notifications and similar.
Nobody’s customers are involved. This is your own team’s pager.
The rule nobody expects
A Telegram bot cannot message a person or chat that has never messaged it first. There is no API call that starts a conversation with a stranger. The user has to send /start or tap through a link before the bot can reach them.
This catches out every customer who imports a contact list and expects it to work like SMS. Tell them during the sales conversation, not after they have bought it.
The usual way to build the audience is deep links of the form https://t.me/botname?start=payload, which open a chat with the bot and pass a parameter to its start handler. Customers put those behind QR codes, ads, emails, SMS and WhatsApp messages, so each new subscriber arrives already identified.
Telegram’s own rate limits
Telegram publishes its limits, and they are not generous for bulk:
- About 1 message per second to a single chat.
- About 20 messages per minute in a group.
- Around 30 messages per second for broadcast on the free tier.
- Up to roughly 1,000 per second on Telegram’s paid broadcast tier, charged per message beyond the free allowance.
Set expectations with volume customers accordingly. Telegram is excellent for engaged, opted in audiences, and poor as an SMS replacement for cold lists.
Which one your customer means
| They say | They mean |
|---|---|
| “We want to send campaigns on Telegram” | Telegram Chat |
| “Our support team wants to reply to Telegram messages” | Telegram Chat, shared inbox |
| “I want to be told when a client’s balance is low” | Telegram Notifications |
| “Alert me when an SMPP session drops” | Telegram Notifications |
| “How do I get my Telegram ID for alerts” | Telegram Notifications, and there is already an article for it |
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