Telegram Channel Scraper

We do the dirty work so your dataset stays clean. 😈

$2.20 / 1,000 posts — pay only for results that land. No credit card required to try.

Export post history from any public Telegram channel via its no-login web preview (t.me/s/{channel}) — no Telegram API key, no bot token, no MTProto session to babysit. We rotate browser fingerprints, retry on rate limits, and walk the pagination cursor backward through a channel's history so you get clean, structured rows: text, media links, view counts, and forwards.

🎯 What this scrapes

• Public Telegram channel post history via the server-rendered /s/{channel} preview surface.
• Channel-level metadata (title, subscriber count, description) captured once per channel.
• Post text, timestamps, view counts, media (photo/video/document), outbound link previews, and forward attribution.
• Every field lands typed and validated — no raw HTML fragments, no guessing at date formats.

🔥 Features

• What we handle for you: browser fingerprint rotation, exponential back-off on rate limits, pagination cursor walking, and Pydantic-validated rows.
• Works on any public channel — no login, no bot token, no MTProto setup.
• Detects private/nonexistent channels and skips them with a clear warning instead of failing the whole run.
• Pay only for results that land — no data means no result charges (only the small actor-start warm-up fee).
• Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated on the way out, so downstream tools never choke on a malformed field.

💡 Use cases

• OSINT analysts tracking a watchlist of political/activist channels for narrative shifts, without opening a Telegram account.
• Crypto researchers archiving trading-signal channels to backtest signal accuracy after the fact.
• News teams backfilling a monitoring dashboard with a channel's full history on day one, instead of only capturing posts going forward.
• Compliance / trust-and-safety teams pulling a channel's public post history as evidence before it goes dark or gets banned.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Open the Actor input form.
2. Add one or more channel usernames to Channel usernames (with or without @/t.me/ prefix).
3. Adjust Max posts per channel (default 100, maximum 5000).
4. Optionally set Since date to stop paginating once posts get older than a given date.
5. Click Start and watch the run log. Results stream into the default dataset in real time.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
usernames	array of string	yes	—	Public channel usernames, with or without @/t.me/ prefix
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	no	100	Cap on posts fetched per channel (1–5000)
sinceDate	string | null	no	null	ISO-8601 date/datetime; stop paginating once older posts are reached
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true}	Apify Proxy configuration

{
  "usernames": ["durov"],
  "maxPostsPerChannel": 100,
  "sinceDate": null,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

📤 Output

One row per post (row_type: "post"), plus one summary row per channel (row_type: "channel_meta"), sharing a single dataset.

{
  "row_type": "post",
  "channel": "durov",
  "post_id": 522,
  "datetime": "2026-05-20T09:12:03+00:00",
  "text": "New update for Telegram...",
  "view_count": 4510000,
  "media_type": "photo",
  "media_url": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/....jpg",
  "outbound_links": ["https://telegram.org/blog/watch-apps-and-more"],
  "forwarded_from": null,
  "reply_count": null,
  "permalink": "https://t.me/durov/522"
}

🔌 Integrate it

Call it from any Python pipeline via apify-client:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("DevilScrapes/telegram-channel-scraper").call(
    run_input={"usernames": ["durov"], "maxPostsPerChannel": 500}
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

No Python shop? Wire the same call into n8n or Make via their built-in Apify node — point it at DevilScrapes/telegram-channel-scraper with the same input JSON and the run drops straight into your workflow.

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event (PPE) — you pay only for what lands in your dataset:

Event	Price (USD)	When
actor-start	$0.20	Once per run, at boot
result	$0.002	Per post row written to the dataset (channel-meta rows are never charged)

Example: scraping 1,000 posts across a handful of channels costs $0.20 (start) + 1,000 × $0.002 (results) = $2.20 per 1,000 posts. No subscription, no minimum, no card required to try it.

🚧 Limitations

• Private / invite-only channels have no public preview and are out of reach by design.
• Comment threads / linked discussion groups are not scraped.
• Reply/comment counts are not exposed on the public preview surface and stay null.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Telegram account to use this Actor?

No. The /s/{channel} preview is Telegram's own no-login, search-engine-facing surface. You run the Actor; we handle the rest.

Can I scrape private or invite-only channels?

No, the /s/{channel} preview only exists for public channels; private channels have no public preview to fetch, by design.

How far back can I go in a channel's history?

As far as the channel's public history goes, up to the Max posts per channel cap (up to 5000) or the Since date cutoff, whichever comes first.

Will I get charged for channels that don't exist or are private?

No. The Actor detects empty/nonexistent previews and skips them with a run-log warning — only the one-time actor-start fee plus result charges for post rows that actually land apply.

Can I get comment/reply counts on posts?

Not from this surface; reply_count is always null (see Limitations).

💬 Your feedback

Found a bug, hit a rate limit, or need a new field on the output row? Open an issue on the Actor's Apify Store page or contact the Devil Scrapes team at apify.com/DevilScrapes. We ship updates within days of validated reports.