Telegram Premium, the new paid subscription from the encrypted messaging platform founded by Pavel Durov, is now officially rolling out for users, as the platform looks for means to monetise. Telegram now has 700 million or 70 crore monthly active users (MAUs) and its new premium service will be rolling out from $4.99 (roughly Rs 390) to $6 (roughly Rs 470), says a report by TechCrunch. The company founder had last week announced that Telegram Premium will be a subscription plan and it will launch this month.
Telegram Premium allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. Durov also noted that all existing features on Telegram would remain free and plenty of new free features will be added in the future.
Telegram's premium service would bring in improved features such as sending files as large as 4GB, up from the previous ability of 2GB, and supporting faster downloads. Other special features include creating up to 20 chat folders with 200 chats in each, adding up to four accounts in the app and pinning up to 10 chats.
"By subscribing to Telegram Premium, users unlock doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management – and a whole lot more.
"At the same time, all existing features that users have come to expect and rely on for nearly a decade remain free. Moreover, non-premium users will be able to enjoy some of Premium's benefits: for example, download the extra-large documents and view stickers sent by premium users, as well as tap to increase counters on premium reactions that were already added to a message," the company wrote in a blog post.
Users worldwide have been asking Telegram to raise the current limits even further, so the company looked into ways to let users go beyond what is already available. However, Telegram noted that if it was to remove all limits for everyone, its server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the "party would be unfortunately over" for everyone.
"Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled," Durov earlier wrote in a blog post.
Telegram had started testing the waters for ways to generate revenue few weeks back as the encrypted messaging app began beta testing of the iOS app with more stickers and more emojis that were made available for Telegram Premium subscribers. The paid version of Telegram for iPhone users with more emojis and stickers was made available in version 8.7.2 and it was first spotted by Android Police.