Telegram's premium membership is here and costs $4.99/month

After announcing Telegram Premium earlier this month, the messaging app has finally rolled out the paid tier, which gives users access to additional features for $4.99/month (via TechCrunch). All the features are outlined in a post on Telegram's blog, with some of its big draws including faster downloads and a larger maximum file upload size of 4GB (instead of the standard 2GB).

Premium subscribers will also get double the limit imposed on standard users. Instead of joining up to 500 channels, subscribers are limited to 1,000 channels. The same goes for the other features on Telegram – customers can create 20 chat folders, save up to 10 stickers, pin up to 10 chats, and add a total of four accounts instead of three in Telegram. Premium users also get longer bios with a link.

Some other benefits include access to a library of premium stickers (like the ones you see on Steam) with more obnoxious full-screen animations, special emoji reactions, and animated profile pictures. If you don't have headphones, there's text to voice message conversion in addition to the chat management tool that allows you to change your default chat folder. Oh, and subscribing to Premium removes sponsored messages in public channels.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's views on the platform's freemium tier have remained unchanged since he first introduced the possibility in 2020. In line with what he said earlier, Durov said last week that the free features would remain free and the new features would not affect Telegram. Experience for non-customers. This means that free Telegram users should be able to download large files uploaded by customers, as well as view the premium reactions or emojis they use.

Durov also promised that Telegram would not stop developing features for free users, which the platform has been following so far. The latest Telegram update displays verified badges in chats (not just in profiles, search results or chat lists), gives public groups the ability to enable join requests, and adds some platform-specific improvements.

That said, Telegram Premium comes with a lot of features, many of which will be appealing to perhaps Telegram's most active – now 700 million strong – user base. I personally like that most of the premium benefits are built on Telegram's existing features. The new tier doesn't put the features behind a paywall that it should have in the first place (like what Twitter did with its "Undo" button).