Telegram founder Pavel Durov isn’t worried about Telegram Premium’s subscriber growth. If even a sliver of the Telegram userbase joins the premium tier, the costs of the app would be taken care of, says Mr. Durov (source: Reuters).
Well, since Telegram Premium was released a few days back, there has been a lot of coverage of its features and how the paid version differs from the vanilla variant. But, the real question is whether those premium features would be enough for its users to switch from the free version. After all, the new treats are mostly enhancements over the existing features.
Have a look:
1. Telegram Premium offers an ad-free experience. No adverts in the public channels like you have in the free version.
2. Telegram Premium file upload limit is 4GB while on the free edition it is 2GB.
3. Telegram Premium users can join up to 1000 channels while the free users can be part of just 500 channels.
4. If you are a Premium user, you can pin up to 10 chats while free folks can only pin up to 5 chats.
5. Telegram Premium users can reserve up to 20 public links whereas free Telegram users can do only 10.
6. You can save up to 400 gifs if you are a premium subscriber but free tier users can only save a max of 200 gifs.
7. There are other Telegram Premium benefits like longer bios, faster downloads, Animated profile pictures, and more which free users don’t get. You can read more about those Telegram Premium features here.
You can get Telegram Premium for $4.99 in the US and in India, it costs ₹469 a month or ₹5,628 a year.
This monthly/yearly charge helps “Telegram pay not only for the additional expenses of premium features but also support the free version of Telegram for everyone”.
“While we are going to release more exciting features for Premium subscribers, we will keep implementing free features available for everyone, and do it faster than any other massively popular app,” said the company while announcing the new paid service.
Telegram calls this “sustainable monetization” and as mentioned in the beginning, Mr Durov says, “The beauty of Telegram Premium is that if just 2.5 percent to 3 percent of our users sign up for this subscription, Telegram will cover its costs, supported purely by its users”. That's good to hear. But only time can tell how it turns out to be.
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