Telegram Scraper — Channel Messages, Views & Channel Info

Telegram Scraper

Scrape public Telegram channels without a Telegram account, phone number or API key: every message with its text, date, views, reactions, photos and videos, files, polls, link previews, hashtags, mentions and links, plus a channel record with the exact subscriber count, description, verified badge and media counters. Page back through a channel's whole history, keep a date window or keywords, or run it on a schedule and get only the new posts. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull the data through the API.

What does Telegram Scraper do?

Telegram Scraper reads the public web preview of Telegram channels (the page anyone sees at t.me/s/<channel>) and turns it into clean records:

• Channel messages — enter durov, @durov or a t.me link and get the channel's messages, newest first, paged back through its history down to the very first post.
• Message links — paste https://t.me/durov/455 and get exactly that message.
• Channel info — title, username, numeric channel id, description, exact subscriber count (e.g. 10,099,107, not "10.1M"), photo / video / file / link counters, verified, scam and fake badges, avatar, and the date of the latest post. Groups, bots and users get a profile record with their member count or type.
• Date window — only messages newer than and/or older than a date (2026-01-31 or relative values like 7 days). Old windows are reached in a few requests, without paging through the newer posts.
• Keywords — keep only messages whose text contains your words, or run Telegram's own in-channel search.
• Only new messages — for scheduled runs: each message is delivered once; the next run returns only what was posted since.

Every message has its id, URL, ISO date, text (plain and HTML), view count as a number, author signature, forwarded-from source, reply-to message, edited flag, media (photo URLs, video URL, thumbnail and duration, documents and audio with name and size, stickers), poll question, options and percentages, link preview (URL, site, title, description, image), reactions with counts (including paid Telegram Stars), inline buttons, hashtags, mentions, links and e-mail addresses.

Use cases

• News and media monitoring — follow news, government and company channels and send every new post to Slack, Google Sheets or your database.
• Crypto and finance intelligence — track token announcements, exchange listings and trading channels with views and reactions as attention signals.
• Brand and competitor research — see what competitors and communities publish, how often, and which posts get the most views and reactions.
• OSINT and journalism — archive public channels around an event with exact timestamps, forwards and reply chains, including posts from years ago.
• Marketing and influencer analysis — compare channels by exact subscriber count, post frequency and average views per post before buying an ad.
• AI and data teams — build text datasets from public channels for sentiment analysis, translation, summarisation or RAG pipelines.

How much does it cost?

You pay only for the results you get (pay-per-event). Duplicates, messages removed by your filters and items over your maxItems limit are never charged.

Event	What you pay for	Free plan	Paid plans (from)
message	One Telegram message in the dataset	$0.31 per 1,000	$0.21 per 1,000
channel	One channel record (title, exact subscribers, counters, description)	$0.31 per 1,000	$0.21 per 1,000

"Paid plans (from)" is the Gold-and-above price; Bronze and Silver plans sit in between. Apify also charges a tiny actor-start fee ($0.00005 per run). Channel records can be switched off with Include channel info.

Worked examples (Free plan prices):

1. Channel archive — 10 channels × 1,000 messages = 10,000 messages + 10 channel records: 10,000 × $0.31 / 1,000 + 10 × $0.31 / 1,000 = $3.10 + $0.0031 = $3.10.
2. Daily monitoring — 20 news channels with Only new messages, about 30 new posts per channel per day: 600 messages × $0.31 / 1,000 = $0.186 per day (plus $0.006 if you keep the daily channel records).

The Apify Free plan includes $5 monthly credit, enough for about 16,000 messages every month.

How to use Telegram Scraper

In Apify Console:

1. Open Telegram Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Enter Channels or message links: usernames (durov), @handles or links (https://t.me/durov, https://t.me/s/durov, https://t.me/durov/455). The form is prefilled with two channels.
3. Set Max messages per channel. Max items caps the whole run.
4. Optionally set a date window (Only messages newer than / older than), Keep messages containing keywords, or Telegram search in each channel.
5. For schedules, switch on Only new messages (and give each schedule its own State name).
6. Click Start. The prefilled input (2 channels × 20 messages) takes about 5 seconds; 2,500 messages from 10 channels take about a minute.
7. Open the Output tab (Messages and Channels views) and export as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML.

Through the API:

1. Get your API token in Apify Console → Settings → Integrations.
2. Call the actor with your input JSON (see Integrations and API).
3. Read the dataset items from the run.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
channels	array	–	Required. Usernames, @handles, t.me / t.me/s/ links, or message links such as https://t.me/durov/455 (that one message).
maxMessagesPerChannel	integer	100	Messages per channel, newest first (up to 100,000). With searchQueries, the cap per keyword. 0 = channel info only.
includeChannelInfo	boolean	true	One channel record per channel.
newerThan	string	–	Stop at messages older than this: YYYY-MM-DD, ISO date-time (UTC) or relative (7 days, 12 hours).
olderThan	string	–	Skip messages newer than this (same formats). With newerThan it makes a window.
keywords	array	–	Keep messages whose text, link-preview title or poll question contains any of these words (case-insensitive).
searchQueries	array	–	Telegram's in-channel search, run per keyword instead of the plain feed.
onlyNewMessages	boolean	false	Deliver only messages newer than the newest one a previous run delivered (per channel and keyword).
stateName	string	default	Separate "already delivered" memory per schedule. Change it to start fresh.
maxItems	integer	1000	Hard cap on all items (messages and channel records) in the run.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Proxy settings. The default datacenter proxy works for Telegram.
debug	boolean	false	Log every page fetched.

Example — three channels, the last 500 messages each, no channel records:

{
    "channels": ["durov", "telegram", "https://t.me/bloomberg"],
    "maxMessagesPerChannel": 500,
    "includeChannelInfo": false,
    "maxItems": 1500
}

Example — everything a channel posted in March 2023:

{
    "channels": ["meduzalive"],
    "newerThan": "2023-03-01",
    "olderThan": "2023-03-31",
    "maxMessagesPerChannel": 5000
}

Example — daily schedule: only new posts that mention a keyword:

{
    "channels": ["cointelegraph", "binance_announcements", "whale_alert_io"],
    "keywords": ["bitcoin", "ETF"],
    "onlyNewMessages": true,
    "stateName": "crypto-daily",
    "includeChannelInfo": false
}

Output

Every item has type (message or channel) and sourceInput (the channel or link it came from). Examples from a real run on 2026-11-07 (long CDN links and texts shortened).

Message

{
    "type": "message",
    "id": 552,
    "url": "https://t.me/durov/552",
    "channelUsername": "durov",
    "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
    "channelId": 1006503122,
    "date": "2026-10-11T14:52:40Z",
    "text": "✨ Designers × AI\n\n🆕 The mockup era is over. Today’s AI tools give every designer a superpower…",
    "textHtml": "✨ <b>Designers × AI<br><br></b>🆕 The mockup era is over…",
    "views": 2090000,
    "viewsText": "2.09M",
    "author": "Pavel Durov",
    "senderName": "Pavel Durov",
    "senderUrl": "https://t.me/durov",
    "viaBot": null,
    "isEdited": false,
    "isForwarded": true,
    "forwardedFrom": { "name": null, "author": null, "url": null, "username": null, "messageId": null },
    "replyTo": null,
    "mediaType": "video",
    "media": [
        {
            "type": "video",
            "url": null,
            "thumbnailUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/…",
            "duration": "1:15",
            "durationSec": 75,
            "title": null,
            "size": null,
            "messageUrl": "https://t.me/durov/552"
        }
    ],
    "mediaCount": 1,
    "poll": null,
    "linkPreview": null,
    "location": null,
    "contact": null,
    "buttons": [],
    "reactions": [
        { "emoji": "⭐", "emojiId": null, "isPaid": true, "count": 10600, "countText": "10.6K" },
        { "emoji": null, "emojiId": "5936157098181135162", "isPaid": false, "count": 19000, "countText": "19K" }
    ],
    "totalReactions": 44090,
    "hashtags": [],
    "mentions": ["designers"],
    "links": ["https://t.me/designers"],
    "emails": [],
    "isContentHidden": false,
    "groupedId": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-11-07T11:29:32Z",
    "sourceInput": "durov",
    "searchQuery": null
}

Channel

{
    "type": "channel",
    "id": 1006503122,
    "username": "durov",
    "url": "https://t.me/durov",
    "title": "Pavel Durov",
    "description": "Founder of Telegram.",
    "descriptionHtml": "Founder of Telegram.",
    "entityType": "channel",
    "subscribers": 10099107,
    "subscribersText": "10.1M",
    "members": null,
    "online": null,
    "photos": 102,
    "videos": 47,
    "audios": null,
    "files": null,
    "links": 200,
    "verified": true,
    "scam": false,
    "fake": false,
    "avatarUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/…",
    "hasPublicPreview": true,
    "lastMessageId": 552,
    "lastMessageDate": "2026-10-11T14:52:40Z",
    "sourceInput": "durov",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-11-07T11:29:32Z"
}

Field notes:

• mediaType is text, photo, video, gif, roundVideo, voice, audio, document, sticker, album (several items in media), poll, location, contact, linkPreview or unsupported (a post type the web preview does not show).
• An album is one message: media lists every photo/video with its own messageUrl, and groupedId marks the album.
• views and reaction count are numbers parsed from Telegram's rounded display (2.09M → 2,090,000); the original text is kept in viewsText / countText.
• Custom-emoji reactions have emojiId and no emoji character; paid Telegram Stars reactions have isPaid: true.
• author is the post signature when the channel signs posts; senderName is the channel (or the group member in discussion groups).
• forwardedFrom.name is empty when the original author hides forwards; url, username and messageId point to the source post when it is a public channel.
• subscribers on the channel record is the exact count from the channel page; subscribersText is the rounded figure shown in the preview.
• Dates are UTC (ISO 8601).

Integrations and API

Run the actor and get the items back in one call:

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

Python with apify-client:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("innolabs/telegram-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "channels": ["telegram", "durov"],
        "maxMessagesPerChannel": 200,
        "newerThan": "30 days",
    }
)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["type"] == "message":
        print(item["date"], item["views"], item["text"][:80])

• Make, Zapier, n8n — use the Apify app/node to start the actor and send new messages to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, Slack or Discord.
• Scheduling — create a schedule in Apify Console (e.g. every hour) with Only new messages on to monitor channels.
• Webhooks — trigger your pipeline when a run finishes.
• AI agents (MCP) — connect Claude, Cursor or other MCP clients through the Apify MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com and let your agent read Telegram channels on demand.

FAQ

Do I need a Telegram account, API key or phone number?

No. The scraper reads the public web preview that Telegram shows to any visitor, so it needs no login, no api_id/api_hash and no phone number. The default Apify Proxy setting works; rate-limited requests are retried automatically on a fresh connection.

Is it legal to scrape Telegram?

The scraper only collects what Telegram publishes openly on t.me for public channels: messages, view counts and channel details. It cannot see private channels, private groups or chats. Messages can contain personal data protected by laws such as GDPR, so make sure you have a legitimate reason to store it and that your use complies with Telegram's terms.

How many messages can I get from a channel?

The whole public history: the scraper pages back 20 messages per request until the first post of the channel (tested: complete histories of two channels, and 1,500 messages from March 2023 of a channel with 150,000 posts). Use maxMessagesPerChannel and maxItems to cap a run, and a date window to fetch only a period.

How does "Only new messages" work?

The scraper remembers the newest message id it delivered per channel (and per search keyword) in a named key-value store in your Apify account. The next run stops as soon as it reaches that message, so you pay only for new posts. The first run works normally and saves the state. Use a different State name per schedule; change it to start over. Each run delivers up to maxMessagesPerChannel new messages per channel.

What is the difference between "Keep messages containing" and "Telegram search"?

Keep messages containing pages through the channel and keeps every message whose text contains one of your words, so it finds matches deep in the history. Telegram search uses Telegram's own search box, which returns only about the 20 newest matches per keyword.

Why are some channels or messages missing?

Groups, bots, users and private channels have no public message preview; for them you get the profile record (type, member count) and a note in the run's SUMMARY. Some channels are hidden by Telegram in certain countries or turn their web preview off. Each channel is processed on its own: one failing channel never stops the run, and you are not charged for it. If every input fails, the run is marked as failed with the reason.

Can I download the photos and videos?

The dataset contains direct photo URLs, video URLs (for videos the preview plays), video thumbnails and durations. The links come from Telegram's CDN and expire after a while, so download them soon after the run. Large videos, documents and audio files are only listed with their name, size and duration: Telegram does not offer them for download to logged-out visitors.

Limits

• Public channels only. Groups, bots and users return a profile record without messages; private channels and invite links (t.me/+…) are not supported.
• Comments under posts (discussion groups) are not collected.
• Telegram rounds views and reaction counts in the preview (e.g. 2.09M); the numbers are as precise as that display. Channel subscriber counts are exact.
• Telegram's in-channel search returns about 20 newest matches per keyword.
• Some post types (e.g. stories, paid media, some animated stickers) are not shown in the web preview; such messages have mediaType: "unsupported" and isContentHidden: true with their date, views and URL.
• Large videos, documents and audio are listed without a download URL.
• Media URLs are temporary.
• Only new messages delivers at most maxMessagesPerChannel new posts per channel and run; set it high enough for your schedule interval.