Telegram Channel Monitor and Keyword Alerts

Watch any public Telegram channel for the words you care about. Give it a list of channels and a list of keywords and it returns every message that mentions one of them, with the text, the date, the view count, the links inside the message and what media was attached. Turn on monitor mode and each scheduled run brings back only what has been posted since the last one, which is the part TGStat and Telemetr charge a monthly subscription for.

There is no login, no phone number and no API key. It reads the same public preview page Telegram itself serves to logged-out visitors at t.me/s/<channel>, so nothing here depends on an account that can be banned.

What it costs

Event	Price
Message delivered	$0.0015 per message ($1.50 per 1,000)
Channel checked	$0.001 per channel actually read ($1.00 per 1,000)
Actor start	$0.001 per run

Bronze, Silver and Gold plans get 10%, 20% and 30% off both per-item prices, so 1,000 messages from 10 channels are $1.51, or $1.06 on Gold. The start fee is flat.

Channels that turn out not to exist are never billed, and when you use keywords you only pay for the messages that actually matched. A run that finds nothing new costs you the start fee plus $0.001 per channel checked, nothing more: a daily monitor on 10 channels that has a completely quiet week costs 7.7 cents.

Apify platform usage is included in the price — and this actor uses no proxy at all, so there is nothing else to pay: no compute line, no proxy line, no subscription, no API key.

What you get

One record per message (recordType: "message"):

Field	Description
channel, channelUsername, channelTitle	The channel as you typed it, its real Telegram username, and its display name
messageId, postId, url	The message number, the channel/id pair, and a direct link to the post
date	When it was posted, ISO 8601 with the timezone
text, textLength	The message text with its line breaks kept, markup stripped
matchedKeywords	Which of your keywords this message hit
views, viewsText	View count as a number (1600000) and as Telegram prints it (1.6M)
authorName	The signature on the post, when the channel signs its posts
hasMedia, mediaTypes, isAlbum	Whether something is attached, and what: photo, video, video_note, voice, audio, document, sticker, poll, location
links, hashtags, mentions	Every link in the message, plus its hashtags and @mentions, lower-cased
linkPreviewUrl, linkPreviewTitle, linkPreviewSite	The link card Telegram rendered under the post
isForwarded, forwardedFrom, forwardedFromUrl	Where a forwarded post came from
isReply, replyToUrl	The post this one replies to
isNewSinceLastRun, isBaseline	Monitor mode only: whether this is a fresh post or part of the first snapshot
scrapedAt	Run timestamp

And one summary per channel (recordType: "channel"):

Field	Description
title, description, isVerified	The channel's name, its bio and whether Telegram verified it
subscribers, subscribersText	Subscriber count as a number and as shown
photosCount, videosCount, filesCount, linksCount	What the channel has posted overall
status, statusDetail	ok, empty, restricted or notfound, and a sentence saying why
messagesFetched, messagesDelivered, pagesFetched	What the run read and what it billed
lastMessageId, previousLastMessageId	Monitor mode: where the watch stands now and where it stood before

Media is reported, not downloaded: you get to know that a post carried a video without paying to transfer it.

Who uses it

Brand and PR teams watching for their company name in the channels where a story breaks before it reaches the press. Crypto and trading desks following token and project channels for announcements. OSINT and research teams tracking a set of channels over months without a personal account in the loop. Newsrooms watching official channels for statements. Sales teams pulling leads out of niche job, deal or classified channels.

Input examples

Watch two channels for the words that matter, most recent 50 messages each:

{
  "channels": ["telegram", "durov"],
  "keywords": ["update", "premium"],
  "maxMessagesPerChannel": 50
}

A daily alert feed: schedule this and every run after the first returns only what is new.

{
  "channels": [
    "https://t.me/telegram",
    "@durov"
  ],
  "keywords": ["outage", "security"],
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "maxMessagesPerChannel": 200,
  "slackWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/T000/B000/xxxx"
}

Everything a channel has posted in the last week, no keyword filter:

{
  "channels": ["toncoin"],
  "sinceDays": 7,
  "maxMessagesPerChannel": 500
}

How monitor mode works

The first run with onlyNewSinceLastRun on gives you the current picture and remembers the newest message it delivered for each channel. Every run after that starts at that mark and stops as soon as it reaches it, so a channel with nothing new costs one page fetch. Adding or removing a channel from the list does not disturb the others: each channel keeps its own position.

If a run is cut short by a charge limit, the messages it did not deliver are not marked as seen, so they come back as new next time rather than being lost.

Questions people ask

Do I need a Telegram account or a phone number? No. This reads the public preview page that Telegram serves to anyone, so there is no session, no login and no account to keep alive.

Can it read private or invite-only channels? No, and it will say so instead of returning nothing. A t.me/+… or joinchat link is skipped with a note in the run's status message. There is no way to read a private channel without being a member, and this actor does not use member accounts.

Some channels come back with status restricted. Why? Public groups, bots and a few channels whose owners switched the web preview off do not serve a message list at t.me/s/. The run tells you which ones and what they are, rather than quietly returning zero.

How far back can it go? As far as the channel's own history goes, up to 8,000 messages per channel in a single run. Telegram serves 20 messages per page and this actor pages backwards through them, so maxMessagesPerChannel: 2000 reads 100 pages. Use sinceDays when you want a date window instead of a count, and schedule repeated runs if you need to walk a very long history.

How does keyword matching work? Case-insensitive, and it looks at the message text, its hashtags, its mentions, the title of any link card and the links themselves. A keyword can be a phrase. Leave the list empty to get every message.

Does it download photos and videos? No. It reports what is attached (hasMedia, mediaTypes) so you can filter on it, and links to the post if you want to open it yourself.

Is this a TGStat or Telemetr alternative? For monitoring, yes: keyword watching across a list of channels, on a schedule, exported as JSON, CSV or Excel, and paid per message instead of per month. It does not do the audience analytics or the channel-discovery search those tools sell.

A run stopped early and said it hit a page budget. What is that? Reading pages is what the run costs; delivering matches is what it bills. If a keyword search reads hundreds of pages without matching much, the run stops rather than keep going, and says so in its status message. Narrow the channel list, widen the keywords, or add sinceDays and it will not come up.

What happens to a channel name I typed wrong? It comes back as status: "notfound" with an explanation, and you are not charged for it. The run still succeeds and the other channels still run.

Related actors

• Threads Scraper for the same job on Threads.
• Brand News Monitor when the mention you are watching for is in the press rather than in a channel.
• LinkedIn Hiring Signals Monitor for the same new-since-last-run pattern on LinkedIn job postings.

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