Telegram’s Premium subscription is here and it costs $4.99 / month

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After announcing Telegram Premium earlier this month, the messaging app has finally rolled out the paid tier, which gives users access to extra features for a monthly fee. Some of Telegram's bigger draws are outlined in a post on Telegram's blog, with some of them including faster downloads and larger maximum file uploads.

Standard users will get double the limits imposed on them. Subscribers are limited to 1,000 channels. Telegram subscribers can create 20 chat folders with 200 chats each, save up to 10 stickers, pin up to 10 chats, and add a total of four accounts to the service. Premium users can have longer bios.

Image: Telegram

You can get access to a library of Premium stickers with more obnoxious full-screen animations, exclusive emoji reactions, and animated profile pictures. Text conversion for voice messages and chat management tools allow you to change your default chat folder if you don't have headphones. There are sponsored messages in public channels.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's views on the platform's freemium tier have not changed since he first brought it up in 2020. Durov stated last week that the Telegram experience for non-subscribers will not be affected by new features. Free Telegram users should be able to download larger files uploaded by subscribers as well as view the premium reactions they use.

Durov promised that Telegram would continue to develop features for free users as well. The latest Telegram update shows verified badges in chats, gives public groups the ability to enable join requests, and adds a few platform specific improvements.

Many of the features in Telegram Premium are attractive to the most active users of Telegram. Most of the perks of Premium are built off of Telegram. The new tier doesn't put features behind a paywall that should've been on the platform in the first place