Telegram Channel Scraper: Posts, Views, Reactions, Alerts

Scrape public Telegram channels into clean JSON, CSV or Excel: post text, exact view counts, every reaction (including paid Telegram Stars), photos, videos, files, polls, link previews, forwards, replies, hashtags, mentions and links, plus a channel row with the exact subscriber count. Many channels per run, date windows, keyword filters, and only-new-posts monitoring for alerts. No login, no phone number, no API keys, no proxy to set up.

$0.30 per 1,000 posts, no start fee. You never pay for channels that can't be read or for posts your filters drop.

Why this Telegram scraper

	This Actor	Typical Telegram scrapers
Login	None. Reads the public channel preview at t.me/s/… that anyone can open in a browser.	Many need your phone number, an api_id/api_hash or a session string, and can get your account limited.
Price	$0.30 / 1,000 posts, down to $0.22 on higher plans. No start fee.	$0.35–5 / 1,000, often plus a $0.01 start fee on every run, which makes hourly monitoring expensive.
Monitoring	Only new posts since the last run, per channel. A channel with nothing new costs $0.0005.	Re-download the same posts every run and pay again.
Numbers	Views as integers (1060000, not "1.06M"), every reaction with its count, paid Stars separated, exact subscribers (10337782).	Strings like "1.2K", reactions missing, rounded subscriber counts.
Many channels	Paste hundreds of channels; usernames, @handles and t.me links all work.	One channel per run, or strict URL formats.
Filters before billing	Date window, keywords, minimum views, media type, forwarded or not, in-channel search. Filtered-out posts are free.	Download everything, filter later, pay for all of it.
Errors	Channels that don't exist, bots, users and groups without a preview are listed with a reason, free.	Silent empty runs, or charged anyway.
Spending	Stops cleanly at your maximum cost per run.	Overruns or opaque fees.

What you can do

• News and media monitoring: follow news, politics and industry channels and get new posts within the hour.
• Crypto and trading signals: watch project, exchange and signal channels; filter by keywords like a ticker.
• Brand and competitor tracking: see what competitors announce and how their audience reacts (views, reactions, paid Stars).
• Research and OSINT: archive public channels for a date range, with forwards and replies to map who reposts whom.
• Content analysis and AI: feed clean post text, links and engagement into dashboards, sentiment analysis or LLM pipelines.
• Influencer and ad vetting: check real subscriber counts and average views before you buy an ad post.
• AI agents: call it from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor through Apify's AI integrations. Input is lenient: "durov", "@telegram", "https://t.me/s/tginfo" all work.
• Your own stack: run it from the Apify API, the Python or JavaScript client, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks or a schedule; export JSON, CSV or Excel.

Quick start

1. Latest posts from a few channels

{ "channels": ["telegram", "durov", "https://t.me/tginfo"], "maxPostsPerChannel": 50 }

2. Everything from the last 30 days

{ "channels": ["durov"], "lastDays": 30, "maxPostsPerChannel": 0 }

3. Alerts: only new posts, every hour

{
    "channels": ["channel_one", "channel_two", "channel_three"],
    "onlyNew": true,
    "monitorName": "my-alerts",
    "maxPostsPerChannel": 100
}

Schedule it hourly and connect a webhook, Slack or email integration. The first run delivers the newest posts as a baseline; every later run delivers only posts published since.

4. Keyword and engagement filters

{
    "channels": ["durov", "tginfo"],
    "keywordsAny": ["ton", "wallet"],
    "minViews": 100000,
    "excludeForwarded": true,
    "dateFrom": "2026-01-01"
}

5. Search inside a channel

{ "channels": ["telegram"], "searchQuery": "stories", "maxPostsPerChannel": 100 }

Output

Post

{
    "type": "post",
    "channel": "durov",
    "postId": 552,
    "url": "https://t.me/durov/552",
    "date": "2026-10-11T14:52:40.000Z",
    "isEdited": false,
    "author": "Pavel Durov",
    "text": "✨ Designers × AI\n\n🆕 The mockup era is over…",
    "views": 1060000,
    "reactions": [
        { "emoji": "⭐", "emojiId": null, "isPaid": true, "count": 5730 },
        { "emoji": "❤", "emojiId": null, "isPaid": false, "count": 12500 }
    ],
    "reactionsTotal": 18230,
    "paidStars": 5730,
    "forwardedFrom": null,
    "replyTo": null,
    "media": [{ "type": "video", "url": null, "thumbnailUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/…jpg", "duration": 75 }],
    "poll": null,
    "linkPreview": null,
    "buttons": [],
    "hashtags": [],
    "mentions": ["designers"],
    "links": ["https://t.me/designers"],
    "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-18T12:00:00.000Z"
}

• media[]: photo, video, gif, round_video, document (file name and size), voice, sticker, location. Direct media URLs are included when Telegram shows the file in the preview; very large videos show a thumbnail and duration only.
• poll: question, type, options with percentages, voters.
• linkPreview: URL, site name, title, description, image.
• forwardedFrom: name, author, channel and post when public. replyTo: the replied post's ID, author and text.
• reactions: standard emoji come as characters; Telegram custom emoji come as emojiId; paid Stars are flagged isPaid.
• With Include post HTML each post also has html (bold, links, quotes kept). In monitoring mode each post has isNew.

Channel

{
    "type": "channel",
    "channel": "durov",
    "status": "ok",
    "title": "Pavel Durov",
    "username": "durov",
    "description": "Founder of Telegram.",
    "verified": true,
    "subscribers": 10337739,
    "subscribersRounded": 10300000,
    "photos": 102,
    "videos": 47,
    "files": null,
    "links": 200,
    "avatarUrl": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/…jpg",
    "previewAvailable": true,
    "latestPostId": 552
}

Channels that can't be read are listed with status: "not-found" or "preview-unavailable" (a user, bot or group) and a plain-language statusMessage. They are free.

Pricing

Pay per event. Platform usage is included: no start fee, no compute or proxy bill on top.

Event	What it is	Price
Post	One post delivered (after your filters)	$0.30 / 1,000 ($0.0003)
Channel info	One channel row: title, description, exact subscribers, counters	$1.00 / 1,000
Monitor check	Monitoring mode: a channel checked, nothing new	$0.50 / 1,000 checks ($0.0005)

Lower rates apply automatically on higher Apify plans (posts down to $0.22 / 1,000, checks down to $0.0003). Never charged: channels without a public preview, failed channels, invalid links, filtered-out posts and posts outside your date window.

Examples:

• 20 latest posts from 10 channels = 200 posts + 10 channel rows = $0.07.
• A 30-day archive of a busy channel (≈ 3,000 posts) = $0.90.
• Hourly monitoring of 10 channels for a month, ~5 new posts per channel per day: 1,500 posts ($0.45) + ~5,700 checks with nothing new ($2.85) ≈ $3.30 / month, with no start fees.

The Actor checks your run's maximum cost before pushing posts and stops cleanly when it is reached, so you never pay more than you set.

Free Apify plan: up to 200 posts from 10 channels per run (a limit set by the developer, not by Apify). Any paid plan removes it.

Good to know

• Public channels only. The Actor reads the same public web preview anyone can open at https://t.me/s/<channel>. Private channels, invite links, groups, chats and member lists are not accessible and not supported.
• Some channels turn the preview off. They show up as preview-unavailable and are free.
• Views and reactions are rounded by Telegram on the preview (e.g. 1.06M). They are converted to numbers; the exact subscriber count comes from the channel page.
• History depth. The preview pages back through the whole public history, 20 posts per page. A scan stops after 10,000 posts per channel unless a date window or your post limit stops it earlier.
• Custom emoji reactions have no standard character; they come as emojiId.
• Polite by design. Requests are paced and retried with backoff, so runs don't hammer Telegram.

Is it legal to scrape Telegram channels?

This Actor reads only publicly available channel previews that Telegram serves to anyone without signing in. It does not log in, does not use a Telegram account or API session, does not access private chats, groups or member lists, and does not bypass any protection. t.me publishes no robots.txt restrictions for these pages. Posts can still contain personal data; you are responsible for using the results lawfully (for example under GDPR) and in line with Telegram's terms. For commercial redistribution of content, consult a lawyer.

FAQ

Do I need a Telegram account, phone number or API key? No. Nothing to set up.

Can it read private channels or groups? No. Only public channels with a web preview.

How fresh is the data? Live: every run reads the channel at that moment. With monitoring on a schedule, new posts arrive at the next run.

Can I get comments? Comments live in linked discussion groups, which have no public preview, so they are not included. replyTo covers replies inside the channel.

What happens when Telegram changes the page? Each run reports per-channel status and fails loudly instead of returning silent empties, so changes are caught and fixed fast. Open an issue in the Issues tab.