Telegram Channel Scraper - Public Channel Messages

Extract messages from a public Telegram channel — no Telegram account, API key or bot token needed. Pass a channel URL or username and get structured messages back.

How it works

Telegram exposes a public web preview for channels at https://t.me/s/CHANNEL_NAME. This actor fetches that static HTML page, parses the messages with BeautifulSoup, and paginates backwards to collect older messages. No headless browser or API credentials are used.

Features

• Simple input — provide a channel URL or username
• Flexible input parsing — accepts https://t.me/channel, https://t.me/s/channel, @channel, or bare channel name
• Pagination — fetches older messages beyond the first page until maxMessages is reached
• Extracted fields — text, date, views, author, forwarded source, links, and media (photos, videos, documents, stickers)
• Retries — retries with exponential backoff on timeouts, rate limits (HTTP 429) and server errors
• Order — messages are pushed in chronological order (oldest first)

Input

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
channelUrl	string	Yes	—	Channel URL or username. Accepts: https://t.me/channel, https://t.me/s/channel, @channel, or channel
maxMessages	integer	No	20	Maximum messages to scrape (1–5000)
includeMedia	boolean	No	true	Include media URLs (photos, videos, documents, stickers) in output

Output

Each message is a flat JSON object:

{
    "message_id": 12345,
    "channel": "example_news",
    "text": "Weekly update is out. Read more at https://example.com",
    "date": "2024-01-15T12:00:00+00:00",
    "author": "Example News",
    "views": 52000,
    "forwarded_from": null,
    "links": ["https://example.com"],
    "url": "https://t.me/example_news/12345",
    "media": [
        {"type": "photo", "url": "https://cdn4.telegram-cdn.org/..."}
    ]
}

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
message_id	integer	Unique message ID within the channel
channel	string	Channel username
text	string	Plain text content (newlines preserved)
date	string	ISO 8601 datetime
author	string	Channel or author name
views	integer	View count (parsed from K/M suffixes)
forwarded_from	string | null	Original author if forwarded
links	array	URLs found in message text
url	string	Direct link to the message
media	array	Media attachments (when includeMedia is true): photo, video, video_thumbnail, sticker (with url) or document (with title)

Use cases

• Content monitoring — track posts from competitors, influencers, or industry channels
• OSINT research — collect public communications for analysis
• Trend detection — monitor channel activity and engagement over time
• Data journalism — archive public channel content for reporting
• Market research — track product announcements and community discussions

Pricing

Pay-per-event, no start fee: $3.50 per 1,000 messages on the Apify Free plan, with lower prices on paid plans.

Event	Free	Starter	Scale	Business	Enterprise
Message (MESSAGE)	$3.50	$3.00	$2.60	$2.10	$2.10

Prices in USD per 1,000 events.

Cost examples (Free plan)

Scenario	Messages	Cost
Quick check (default)	20	$0.07
Daily monitoring	100	$0.35
Channel archive	1,000	$3.50
Large-scale research	5,000	$17.50

Limitations

• Public channels only — the actor reads the t.me/s/ web preview; private channels and groups are not supported
• Web preview must be enabled — some channels disable the t.me/s/ preview; those runs fail with a "not found or is private" error
• No real-time streaming — the actor scrapes a snapshot; for new messages, schedule recurring runs
• Media URLs are CDN links — they may expire after some time; download media promptly if needed
• Rate limits — Telegram may rate-limit frequent requests; the actor waits and retries on HTTP 429 (up to 3 attempts per page), then stops paginating

Python 3.11, async httpx, BeautifulSoup + lxml, Apify SDK.

Related Actors

• YouTube Transcript Scraper - Captions & Comments — Scrape YouTube video transcripts (captions and auto-generated subtitles) with timestamps, video metadata and optional comments.
• Google News Scraper - News Articles by Keyword — Scrape Google News articles for any keyword: headlines, sources, publish dates, URLs and snippets.
• Google Trends Scraper - Interest Over Time & Related Queries — Scrape Google Trends: interest over time and related queries for up to 5 compared keywords, by country, time range and category.