Telegram Channel Scraper — Public Posts, Views & Media

Read any public Telegram channel and get one row per post: the text, the publish date, the view count as a real number, photo/video flags, forward and reply markers, and a direct link.

No API key, no bot token, no phone number, no login. $0.01 per post — a channel with no public posts is recorded and not charged.

Input

{ "channel": "durov", "maxPosts": 50 }

Bulk:

{ "channels": ["durov", "telegram", "durov"], "maxPosts": 100 }

Field	Type	Notes
channel	string	Accepts durov, @durov, t.me/durov or https://t.me/s/durov.
channels	string[]	Up to 10 channels per run.
maxPosts	integer	1–300 per channel, default 20. You are charged per post returned.

Output

One row per post:

{
  "ok": true,
  "channel": "durov",
  "postId": 547,
  "url": "https://t.me/durov/547",
  "text": "💸 In just one month, Telegram has awarded over $2,222,000 …",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-06T17:40:39+00:00",
  "views": 1070000,
  "viewsLabel": "1.07M",
  "hasPhoto": false,
  "photoUrl": null,
  "hasVideo": false,
  "isForwarded": false,
  "forwardedFrom": null,
  "isReply": false
}

What it gets right

• View counts are numbers. Telegram writes "1.07M" for humans; that is unsortable and unfilterable, so you get views: 1070000 and the original viewsLabel. The multiplier is applied, so 1.07M never arrives as 1.07.
• It pages past 20. One Telegram preview page holds 20 posts; asking for more walks backwards with ?before=, de-duplicates by post id, and stops if a page repeats — so a pager that spun could never bill you twice for the same post.
• Emoji are not photos. Telegram renders emoji as background images from the same CSS property real photos use. Counting those naively marks every text post as having a photo; emoji URLs are excluded, so hasPhoto means an actual image.
• Text is text. HTML tags are stripped, <br> becomes a newline, and entities are decoded in the correct order so " ends up as " and not ".
• Posts come back newest first, and never more than maxPosts — the number you are billed on.
• It cannot hang. Paging is bounded by a page budget as well as by maxPosts. An unbounded loop would run to the platform kill and be recorded as a store-visible TIMED-OUT failure.

Pricing

$0.01 per post returned. No start fee. A private, empty or non-existent channel produces an ok: false record explaining which, and is not charged.

Set maxPosts to control spend: 20 posts across 3 channels is 60 rows, $0.60.

Limits

• Public channels only. Private channels and group chats have no public preview and cannot be read by anything without an account — this returns an honest error rather than an empty page.
• 10 channels per run, up to 300 posts each.
• Reads the channel's public web preview, so it sees what a logged-out visitor sees: no member lists, no reactions breakdown, no comment threads.
• photoUrl is Telegram's own CDN link and expires; download it if you need to keep it.

FAQ

Do I need a bot token or phone number? No. Neither.

Can it read private channels or groups? No — nothing can, without an account.

Why are some posts missing text? Media-only posts genuinely have none; text is an empty string and hasPhoto / hasVideo tell you what it was.

Is there a comments/replies feed? isReply flags a reply, but the discussion thread lives in a linked group that has no public preview.

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-09-10) — first release. One row per post, numeric view counts, backwards paging, media/forward/reply flags, bulk channels.