Telegram Channel Scraper & Keyword Monitor

Scrape public Telegram channels and monitor them for keywords — no API key, no phone number, no login. Built for reliability and for AI agents: clean, flat, predictable JSON on every run.

This actor reads Telegram's public web preview (t.me/s/<channel>), the same data any browser sees when you open a channel without an account. It never logs in, never touches your Telegram account, and never asks for a phone number.

Why this one

Most Telegram actors do the same basic dump. Two things break them in production, and this actor fixes both:

• They crash on rate limits. This actor retries every request with exponential backoff and can fall back to Apify Proxy, so a long run finishes instead of dying at channel #7.
• They only scrape, they don't watch. Monitor mode remembers the last post it saw per channel and returns only new posts on each scheduled run — turn any channel list into a keyword alert feed.

What you get per message

{
  "channel": "durov",
  "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
  "channelSubscribers": 11700000,
  "id": 510,
  "url": "https://t.me/durov/510",
  "datetime": "2026-05-12T17:28:39+00:00",
  "text": "🌍 With 400 validators across 6 continents, TON is one of the most…",
  "views": 3440000,
  "reactions": [
    { "emoji": "🔥", "count": 12045, "type": "unicode" },
    { "emoji": null, "count": 132000, "type": "custom", "emojiId": "5265077361648368841" },
    { "emoji": null, "count": 14300, "type": "paid" }
  ],
  "media": ["photo"],
  "forwardedFrom": null,
  "links": ["https://ton.org"],
  "matchedKeywords": ["ton"],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-10T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Input

Field	Type	Description
channels	array (required)	@name, name, or https://t.me/name
keywords	array	Save only posts containing a keyword (case-insensitive). Empty = save all
keywordMatch	substring | word	Substring (default) or whole-word matching
mode	scrape | monitor	scrape = history; monitor = only new posts since last run
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	Cap on posts scanned per channel (default 100)
postsNewerThan	ISO date	Stop paging once older posts are reached
minViews / minReactions	integer	Skip low-engagement posts
useProxy	boolean	Route via Apify Proxy (only needed for large jobs)

Example: monitor three news channels for a brand

{
  "channels": ["telegram", "durov", "bloomberg"],
  "keywords": ["bitcoin", "regulation", "SEC"],
  "keywordMatch": "word",
  "mode": "monitor"
}

Schedule this every 15 minutes and the dataset fills only with new, on-topic posts.

Use cases

• Brand & crypto monitoring — alert when your project, ticker, or competitor is mentioned across channels.
• OSINT & news — track announcements from public channels into a structured feed.
• AI agents (MCP) — flat JSON output plugs straight into a RAG pipeline or an MCP tool call ("what did channel X post about Y this week?").
• Research & analytics — export engagement (views, reactions) over a channel's history.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00001
Message saved	$0.0002

$0.20 per 1,000 saved messages. You pay only for messages that pass your filters — the start fee is one thousandth of a cent, so there is no charge for a run that finds nothing.

Apify platform usage (compute + storage) is billed to your own account on top. It is small and measured, not guessed: three real runs on 2026-09-21 scraped 200, 273 and 300 posts and used $0.0096–0.0099 of platform usage per 1,000 posts — under 5% of the price above. Scraping 1,000 posts therefore costs about $0.21 all-in, and the Apify free tier covers testing.

Limits & honest notes

• Works only with public channels that have web preview enabled. Private channels, groups, and comments are not accessible (and scraping them would require an account — out of scope by design).
• t.me/s/ serves ~20 posts per page; the actor paginates backward through history up to your limit.
• Reads public preview data only. This actor does not use MTProto, does not collect member lists, and does not require your credentials.
• You are responsible for complying with Telegram's Terms and applicable law in your use of the data.

Local development

npm install
apify run -p           # requires apify-cli and Docker/Node 18+

src/parser.js isolates all HTML parsing — if Telegram ever changes its preview markup, that single file is the only thing to update.