Telegram Premium adds big features but you'll pay through the nose for it

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Telegram On Iphone
Telegram On Iphone (Image credit: Luke Filipowicz/iMore)

What you need to know

  • Telegram Premium is official and will cost $4.99 per month.
  • Users can sign up for Telegram Premium today.
  • Features include larger file uploads, faster downloads, doubling of various limits, and more.

Telegram Premium is now official, with the instant messaging outfit confirming the name of the service, the features you'll get, and how much you'll need to pay to get them. The good news is there are some features of note, but you're going to spend more than you probably hoped to get them.

We've been waiting for Telegram Premium to be officially announced since CEO Pavel Durov outed it earlier this month. Now, Telegram has confirmed everything via a new blog post that also declared the service has now passed the 700 million user threshold.

As cool as that is, all we're really interested in here is that new Telegram Premium subscription. We now know for sure that it'll cost $4.99 per month or a local equivalent — it's £4.99/m in the UK — and that could be more than you'd been hoping for. That's the price that had been bandied around over the last couple of weeks though, so it's probably something we should have expected.

Thankfully, the features you'll get could turn out to be worth it, depending on how you use Telegram. Top of the list is support for 4GB file uploads while downloading files will now happen faster than ever, with Telegram saying they'll download "as fast as your network can keep up."

Telegram has also confirmed that some limits will be doubled, including channels, chat folders, and more.

Premium users get increased limits for almost everything in the app. With Premium, you can follow up to 1000 channels, create up to 20 chat folders with up to 200 chats each, add a fourth account to any Telegram app, pin 10 chats in the main list and save up to 10 favorite stickers.

On top of that, we have voice-to-text conversion, premium stickers, unique reactions, and more. Telegram Premium subscribers will even get a little badge beside their name to show that they're a fully paid-up member of the club. There's a lot more offered as part of the subscription, too — you won't see any ads, and you can even use one of a handful of premium app icons for your Home Screen. Telegram already offered one of the best iPhone icons in terms of doing its job without being overly fussy and the new additions are a little more flashy than the default.

You can read all about what Telegram Premium has to offer in the Telegram announcement post, but you'll find a similar explainer in-app, too.

$4.99 per month isn't cheap, but it could be worth it to heavy Telegram users. If that's not you, maybe just pass on this one.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.