Telegram bot limits you should know

How many messages a bot can send

Telegram limits how fast a bot can send messages, so that bots can't flood chats. These are the numbers from Telegram's own bot documentation:

Short bursts above these numbers are usually tolerated. If a bot keeps going, Telegram starts refusing messages for a while and asks it to wait.

The broadcast limit matters most. At 30 messages per second, sending an announcement to 10,000 users takes about six minutes, and 100,000 users takes about an hour. That's normal, not a sign that something is broken.

Paid broadcasts for very large bots

Very large bots can turn on paid broadcasts in @BotFather. This raises the limit to 1,000 messages per second, and each message above the free 30 per second costs 0.1 Telegram Stars. It's only available to bots with at least 100,000 monthly active users and a balance of at least 100,000 Stars.

A bot can't message someone first

A bot can only write to people who have opened it and tapped Start, or who have written to it. It can't cold-message a user it found somewhere. This is one of the main reasons Telegram bots have far less spam than email.

In practice, that means every user you can reach is someone who chose to talk to your bot. If a user blocks the bot, it can't message them again until they unblock it. See how to message all your users without losing them.

File size limits

These are the limits of Telegram's standard Bot API, which almost every bot uses. The 20 MB limit is the one people notice: if someone sends a 40 MB video to a file converter bot, the bot can't download it. Good bots say so clearly instead of failing silently.

That's why tools like the PDF bot and the file converter work with files up to 20 MB.

Command and deep link rules

The 120-character about text is short, so lead with what the bot does. Save details for the description, which new users see before they tap Start. See how to set the description and about text.

How many bots you can create

One Telegram account can create 20 bots with @BotFather by default. Telegram Premium raises this to 40. Telegram doesn't publish these numbers in its main documentation and could change them, but they've been stable for years.

If you need more, a second Telegram account can create its own bots. Each bot is still owned by the account that created it.

What a bot sees in a group

By default, bots run in privacy mode. In a group, a bot in privacy mode only receives:

• Commands meant for it, like /start@your_bot
• Replies to its own messages
• Messages sent through it in inline mode
• Service messages, like someone joining

A bot that's a group admin, or whose privacy mode is turned off, receives every message except those from other bots. No bot can see messages from other bots. If a bot in your group ignores normal messages, this is almost always why. The fix is in how to add a bot to a group.

How Echo Maker works within these limits

If you use Echo Maker, you don't manage any of this in code. The templates work within Telegram's file limits and tell users when a file is too big, and privacy mode only matters for the group templates, whose setup steps tell you to make the bot an admin.

The one number worth remembering is broadcast time. Because of the 30-per-second limit, a message to 100,000 users takes about an hour to reach everyone, whichever tool sends it.