Telegram Channel Scraper

Scrape posts from any public Telegram channel without a Telegram API key, login or phone number: text, date, view count, photos, videos, documents, polls, forwards, replies and link previews, plus subscriber counts. Built for hourly monitoring: a keyword filter and a date filter run on Telegram's side, and a since-last-run checkpoint means a scheduled run only fetches posts you have not seen yet. $0.60 per 1,000 posts, nothing charged for errors, summaries or empty runs. The first 25 posts each month are free for every account.

Why this one

	This actor
Credentials	None. Reads the public web preview Telegram serves for every open channel.
Price	$0.0006 per post ($0.60 per 1,000), $0.0012 per channel-info record, $0.002 per run. No platform usage charged on top.
Scheduled monitoring	onlyNewSinceLastRun stores the newest post ID per channel and stops there next time. A run that finds nothing new costs only the $0.002 start fee, so put all your channels in one run.
Filters	searchQuery (Telegram-side keyword search), postedAfter (date cut-off), maxPostsPerChannel.
Output	Structured fields for media, polls, forwards, replies and link previews; plain text plus textHtml; extracted links.
Reliability	One summary record per channel with status and stoppedBy; private or missing channels produce an error record instead of a failed run; tested against live channels every day.
Speed	No browser. About 20 posts per request; 1,000 posts in well under a minute.

What people use it for

• Monitoring: new posts from crypto, finance, tech, OSINT or local-news channels every hour into Slack, Google Sheets, a webhook or your own app.
• Brand and competitor tracking: who mentions your product, what competitors announce, and how many views each post gets.
• Datasets: thousands of posts per run for research, trend analysis or model training, with views as an engagement signal.
• AI agents and RAG: fresh channel content through the Apify API or the Apify MCP server.
• Archiving: posts and media links before they are edited or deleted.

Example tasks

Ready-made configurations you can open, copy and run as they are:

• Monitor Telegram channels for brand mentions every hour: three news channels filtered for one keyword, with the since-last-run checkpoint on, so an hourly schedule returns only new mentions.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
channels	array	required	Usernames (durov, @telegram) or links (https://t.me/bloomberg, https://t.me/s/bloomberg).
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	100	Stop after this many posts per channel, newest first. Up to 100,000.
postedAfter	string	–	ISO date (2026-01-01 or 2026-01-01T12:00:00Z) or a relative value (7d, 12h, 2w). Older posts are skipped and pagination stops.
searchQuery	string	–	Keyword filter applied by Telegram, like the search box on t.me. You pay only for matching posts. Telegram's public search returns the newest ~22 matches per channel per run, so schedule it with onlyNewSinceLastRun for monitoring, or scrape without a query and filter yourself for full history.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	boolean	false	Checkpoint mode for schedules: remembers the newest post ID per channel and stops there on the next run.
checkpointStoreName	string	telegram-channel-scraper-state	Key-value store that holds the checkpoints. Use different names for independent monitors.
includeChannelInfo	boolean	true	Also output one channel record per channel.
proxyConfiguration	object	none	Optional Apify Proxy. Telegram's preview rarely blocks; enable only on HTTP 429.

{
    "channels": ["durov", "https://t.me/telegram"],
    "maxPostsPerChannel": 200,
    "postedAfter": "2026-10-01",
    "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true
}

Output

Three record types share one dataset, told apart by type.

post (charged, $0.0006 each). A real row from the channel durov, URLs shortened:

{
  "type": "post",
  "channelUsername": "durov",
  "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
  "postId": 552,
  "url": "https://t.me/durov/552",
  "datetime": "2026-10-11T14:52:40+00:00",
  "text": "✨ Designers × AI\n\n🆕 The mockup era is over. Today’s AI tools give every designer a superpower: you can now craft your ideas, not just draw them.\n\nThe gap betwee…",
  "textHtml": "<tg-emoji emoji-id=\"5325547803936572038\"><i class=\"emoji\" style=\"background-imag…",
  "views": 827000,
  "author": "Pavel Durov",
  "isForwarded": true,
  "forwardedFromTitle": "Telegram Designers",
  "forwardedFromUrl": "https://t.me/designers/266",
  "replyToUrl": null,
  "replyToText": null,
  "isEdited": false,
  "hasMedia": true,
  "mediaCount": 1,
  "photos": [],
  "videos": [
    {
      "src": null,
      "thumbnail": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/eFjP3GIB6wa2kR_lnaHB7AArrvWLaHK1V1vSlTRnC…",
      "duration": "1:15"
    }
  ],
  "documents": [],
  "sticker": null,
  "poll": null,
  "linkPreview": null,
  "links": [
    "https://t.me/designers"
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-14T14:16:47.061Z"
}

Field	Type	Notes
postId, url	number, string	Message ID inside the channel and its public link.
datetime	string	ISO 8601 with timezone, as Telegram serves it (UTC).
text, textHtml	string	Plain text with line breaks kept; original HTML with links and formatting.
views	number	Parsed from Telegram's 5.8K / 1.2M labels.
author	string or null	Post signature when the channel shows authors.
isForwarded, forwardedFromTitle, forwardedFromUrl	boolean, string	Source of forwarded posts.
replyToUrl, replyToText	string	Quoted post when the message is a reply.
photos	array of URLs	Full-size photo URLs from Telegram's CDN.
videos	array	src, thumbnail, duration per video.
documents	array	title, extra (size and type) per file.
sticker	string or null	Sticker image URL.
poll	object or null	question, type, options[{text, percent}], voters.
linkPreview	object or null	url, siteName, title, description, image.
links	array of URLs	External links found in the text.
hasMedia, mediaCount, isEdited, scrapedAt	misc	Convenience fields.

channel (charged, $0.0012 each, once per channel when includeChannelInfo is on):

{
  "type": "channel",
  "channelUsername": "durov",
  "url": "https://t.me/durov",
  "title": "Pavel Durov",
  "description": "Founder of Telegram.",
  "subscribers": 10400000,
  "photos": 102,
  "videos": 47,
  "files": null,
  "links": 200,
  "isVerified": true,
  "photoUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/FWIGUGKY0bM70FOlazh5shsW7eGb3MwXQM8PmHDN4…"
}

summary (free, one per channel at the end of the run). status is COMPLETE, PARTIAL (stopped by your spending limit or a failed request), EMPTY or ERROR; stoppedBy is maxPosts, postedAfter, checkpoint, endOfChannel, chargeLimit or requestFailed:

{
  "type": "summary",
  "channelUsername": "durov",
  "status": "COMPLETE",
  "postsScraped": 3,
  "newestPostId": 552,
  "oldestPostId": 548,
  "newestPostDate": "2026-10-11T14:52:40+00:00",
  "oldestPostDate": "2026-09-11T16:04:02+00:00",
  "stoppedBy": "maxPosts",
  "checkpointUsed": null
}

error (free): {"type": "error", "channelUsername": "...", "error": "Channel is private, does not exist, or Telegram disabled its web preview."}

Pricing and cost examples

Try it free. The first 25 posts each calendar month are free for every Apify account, with nothing to enter: the actor keeps count in a small key-value store in your account (free-slice-telegram-channel-scraper) and charges only from the 26th on. The free results are real results you keep; the counter resets on the first of each month.

Job	Posts	Cost
One-off export of a channel's last 1,000 posts	1,000	$0.60
Hourly monitor of 20 channels averaging 5 new posts an hour each, with the checkpoint on	2,400 a day	about $1.45 a day, $44 a month
Keyword watch (searchQuery) that matches 30 posts a day across your channels	30 a day	under $0.02 a day
Archive of a 50,000-post channel	50,000	$30, in a few minutes

Platform compute is included in the prices. Every run starts with a fixed $0.002 (one more per GB of memory above 1 GB); a run that finds nothing new costs only that, so a schedule with all your channels in one run is the cheapest way to monitor.

Discounts for paid Apify plans, applied automatically to the buyer's plan: Bronze 10% off, Silver 25% off, Gold and enterprise tiers 40% off the prices above. Free-plan users pay the listed price.

Scheduling: hourly monitoring in two minutes

1. Create a task from this actor with your channels and onlyNewSinceLastRun: true.
2. Add an Apify schedule (for example every hour).
3. Add an integration on the task: Slack, Google Sheets, email, Make, Zapier, n8n or a webhook. Each run delivers only new posts; the summary records tell you per channel whether the run was complete.

The first checkpoint run fetches up to maxPostsPerChannel posts; later runs stop at the previous newest post. To start over, change checkpointStoreName or delete the key-value store.

Run it from your code

Node.js:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('agentsgearbox/telegram-channel-scraper').call({
    channels: ['durov', 'telegram'], maxPostsPerChannel: 100, onlyNewSinceLastRun: true,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((i) => i.type === 'post'));

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("agentsgearbox/telegram-channel-scraper").call(run_input={
    "channels": ["durov", "telegram"], "maxPostsPerChannel": 100, "onlyNewSinceLastRun": True})
posts = [i for i in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items() if i["type"] == "post"]

cURL (synchronous, returns the dataset):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/agentsgearbox~telegram-channel-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"channels": ["durov"], "maxPostsPerChannel": 50}'

For AI agents

Give your agent hands. Instead of fetching pages, getting blocked and reasoning over HTML, it calls this actor as a tool and gets verified results back as JSON, priced per result. Reading 1,000 Telegram posts through a browser tool is about a million tokens of HTML. This actor returns them as clean JSON with views, media and links for $0.60.

• MCP, this actor only: add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=agentsgearbox/telegram-channel-scraper to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client (with your Apify token), then ask for "the last 50 posts from the Bloomberg Telegram channel, summarized".

• MCP, all agentsgearbox actors: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=agentsgearbox/telegram-channel-scraper,agentsgearbox/google-play-reviews-scraper,agentsgearbox/substack-scraper,agentsgearbox/google-news-scraper,agentsgearbox/brand-name-generator,agentsgearbox/ai-readiness-audit,agentsgearbox/company-lookup,agentsgearbox/app-intelligence,agentsgearbox/app-store-reviews-scraper,agentsgearbox/company-jobs-scraper,agentsgearbox/apple-podcasts-scraper,agentsgearbox/remote-jobs-scraper

• No Apify account? This actor is eligible for Apify's agentic payments: an agent can buy a spend-capped token through agi.apify.com (x402, MPP or Skyfire) and call the API directly.
• Prices are per result and known in advance, so the agent can set a spending limit; error records come back as data instead of failed runs.

Limitations, stated plainly

• Public channels only. Private channels, channels that disabled the web preview and most groups return an error record.
• Comments live in a linked discussion group and are not part of the preview; reactions are not shown either.
• Photo and video URLs point to Telegram's CDN and can expire after some hours. Download them right away if you need to keep them.
• searchQuery uses Telegram's own search, which matches words, not substrings, and returns only the newest ~22 matches per channel per run (a Telegram limit, measured on several channels and words).
• Telegram serves about 20 posts per page, so a 100,000-post archive takes a few minutes.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause and fix
error record for a channel	The channel is private, misspelled, or has the preview disabled. Open https://t.me/s/<name> in a browser: if it redirects to the app page, the actor cannot read it either.
0 posts with the checkpoint on	Nothing new since the last run. Check the summary record: stoppedBy: "checkpoint".
Exactly 22 (or fewer) posts per channel with searchQuery	Telegram's public search exposes only the newest ~22 matches per channel per request, whatever the word.
HTTP 429 in the log	Rare; enable Apify Proxy in proxyConfiguration.
Run stopped with PARTIAL	Your spending limit for the run was reached. Raise it or lower maxPostsPerChannel.

Track record

• Published 13 October 2026 and tested every day since by an automated run against public channels; every test run has succeeded. The Store's run statistics on this page reflect those runs with a delay of up to a day.
• Built without a browser, so a run cannot fail on Chrome crashes or memory limits, which is the usual failure mode of browser-based scrapers in this category.
• Changes are released only after a local test and a real platform run, and every actor from this account is monitored daily, so a breaking change on the target site is normally fixed the same day.

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All of them are pay-per-event, run without a browser, and are compared with their alternatives on agentsgearbox.com.

Support

Open an issue on this actor's Issues tab, usually answered within a day, or email support@agentsgearbox.com. More actors and daily comparisons of scrapers for 200+ websites at agentsgearbox.com.

Legal and fair use

This actor only reads pages Telegram serves publicly without logging in. Respect Telegram's terms, channel owners' rights and privacy law (such as GDPR) when storing or republishing content.