Best Telegram Subscription Bots Compared: Fees, Payments and Failed Cards

The best Telegram subscription bot depends on three things: how much you sell each month, how your subscribers want to pay, and what you want to happen when a card fails. If you are starting out or your income moves around, a bot that charges a percentage and no monthly fee costs least. Once sales are steady, a flat monthly plan often wins. If your audience pays with PayPal or crypto, that narrows the list more than price does. This page compares seven options on those three points, using what each vendor's own site said on 12 October 2026.

What a Telegram subscription bot does

Every bot on this list does the same basic job. You add the bot to your private channel or group, in most cases as an administrator. When someone pays, the bot gives them a way in. When they stop paying, it takes them out.

Telegram's Bot API shows how. A bot that is an administrator with the right permissions can create an invite link with an expiry date or a member limit, approve a join request, and ban a user, after which that person cannot return through an invite link until they are unbanned. No bot can do more than this inside Telegram, so the bots differ in everything around it: checkout, payment methods, fees, and how they deal with renewals.

If you have not set up the channel itself yet, start with how to create a paid Telegram channel.

The seven options at a glance

All figures are from the linked pages on 12 October 2026 and leave out what the payment processor charges, unless noted. Prices change, so open the link before you decide.

Two notes on reading the table. InviteMember's page shows both a lower and a higher yearly total for each plan ($390 and $468 for the first one); the lower one matches its "per month" price times twelve, so that is the one used here. BotSubscription's page shows one worked example, a €100 month costing €1.35, but the full bracket table did not load when we opened it, so we cannot give its rate at other volumes.

What each one costs at four sales levels

A percentage and a flat fee cannot be compared without a number for sales. Here is the arithmetic for the bots with published rates in dollars, at four levels of monthly sales, before payment processing.

What the numbers say:

• Below about $650 a month in sales, 5% is less than InviteMember's cheapest plan ($32.50 divided by 0.05). A month with no sales costs nothing on a percentage and still costs the plan price on a flat fee.
• InviteMember's plans step up at $1,000 and $2,000, so the answer flips more than once. The flat plan is cheaper from about $650 to $1,000, the percentage is cheaper again from $1,000 to about $1,317, the flat plan from there to $2,000, and the percentage from $2,000 to about $2,483. From there up to $5,000, the limit of the largest plan on the page, the flat plan is cheaper by a widening margin.
• Metricgram is not in the table because it bills in euros. Its €19.95 plan is a fixed cost for one group with no transaction fee stated, so it does not grow with sales.
• InviteMember's annual prices assume you pay for a year up front. If you are not sure the channel will last a year, compare against its monthly billing instead.
• MyMembers says on its own site that high-volume sellers can agree a lower commission than 5%. If you are in that range, ask before you assume the table applies.

Whop is hard to place in this table because its 2.7% + $0.30 covers card processing as well, and it charges separately for payouts ($2.50 for a next-day ACH payout on its fee page). Check the Telegram app's listing inside Whop for any fee that applies to products using it before you rely on the headline rate.

How subscribers pay, and where the money goes

There are two models, and they feel different when you run a business on them.

Your own payment account. MyMembers, InviteMember, Metricgram, Sublaunch and BotSubscription connect to an account you own. Subscribers pay you, and the bot only manages access. Metricgram's site says members' payments "go directly to your Stripe account". BotSubscription says it "never holds or touches your funds". With MyMembers, payments go to your own Stripe account and Stripe pays out to your bank on the schedule set there. The practical benefit: your customers, subscriptions and payout history stay in your account if you ever change tools.

The platform's checkout. Whop's fee page lists processing fees and payout fees, which means payments run through Whop and it pays you out. That is one account less to manage, but your balance sits with the platform until payout, and each payout has its own fee.

Payment methods matter more than most comparisons admit. If your subscribers are in countries where cards are uncommon, or they expect to pay in crypto, a card-only checkout loses sales no matter how low the fee is. BotSubscription lists the widest range, including Razorpay, Paystack and crypto. InviteMember supports PayPal and crypto alongside Stripe. MyMembers, Metricgram and Sublaunch are built around Stripe.

For how Stripe subscriptions work underneath, see the guide to Stripe recurring payments.

What happens when a payment fails

A failed renewal is how a paying member is lost without choosing to leave. Vendors say little about it on their sales pages, so ask before you sign up.

With a Stripe subscription, the retries happen in Stripe, not in the bot. Stripe's documentation says its Smart Retries feature picks the times to try the card again, and that the recommended default is 8 tries within 2 weeks. If every retry fails, the subscription is cancelled, marked unpaid or left past due, depending on a setting in your Stripe account. The bot then acts on the result.

What each vendor says:

Three questions to put to any vendor: Is the member told their card failed, and by whom? Do they keep access while retries run? Can they update their card without subscribing again?

Do you need a bot at all? Telegram Stars

Telegram has a built-in option. A channel owner can create an invite link that lets people join in exchange for a monthly payment in Telegram Stars, under Channel Settings, Channel Type, Manage Invite Links. It takes a few taps and needs no third party.

The limits are in the Bot API reference: a subscription invite link is for a channel, the period must be 30 days, and the price is between 1 and 10,000 Stars. The link takes a price and a period and nothing else, so there is no yearly plan, free trial or one-time price, and the payment is in Stars, Telegram's in-app currency, not a card charge into your own payment account. For a simple channel with an audience that already holds Stars, it is a fair choice. For groups, other billing periods or card payments in your own currency, you need a bot.

Which one to choose

1. Starting out, or income that varies month to month: a percentage with no monthly fee. MyMembers at 5%, or BotSubscription's tiered share.
2. Steady sales above about $2,500 a month on Telegram only: a flat plan. InviteMember, or Metricgram if you sell access to groups and want its group tools too (auto-replies, scheduled messages, a dashboard).
3. Subscribers who pay with PayPal, crypto or local methods: BotSubscription or InviteMember.
4. Discord or Slack as well as Telegram: LaunchPass covers all three. BotSubscription and Sublaunch cover Telegram and Discord.
5. You would rather be paid out by a platform than run your own payment account: Whop.
6. A single channel, monthly only, paid in Stars: Telegram's own subscription link.

Whichever you pick, run one real payment through it yourself before you announce it: subscribe with your own card, check that you were let in, cancel, and check that you were removed.