Anywhere 
29/12/2020 The messaging app, Telegram, has wised up to the fact that money can be made from providing services.
Albeit, Telegram offers many features free of charge – and we are assured these will remain free of charge – but Telegram has announced that they will launch pay-for services in 2021 and, as Pavel Durov, the founder of the Russian-based company, said: “We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users.”
Other messaging apps have discovered that revenue can be generated from their apps and since Telegram already has almost 500 million users, Durov figured out that it was time to cash in on this fact and bolster the financing of the app and so take less out of his own pocket to support it. Telegram will be able to offer a more attractive app with the owners getting benefit from it themselves. This incoming revenue will act a safety net for Telegram’s continued existence and a stepping stone towards being able to provide more, better, and safer features to its users and, overall, a better user experience.
Telegram is “a freeware, cross-platform cloud-based instant messaging, video calling and VoIP service” (Wikipedia). It is particularly popular in the ex-Soviet Union countries and Iran but its popularity as a medium for private messaging and sharing information and news is picking up globally, thus providing an endless potential market for Durov and his buddies.
To clarify, Telegram’s existing services will remain free of charge to regular users and ad-free but Telegram is targeting business or power users who commonly use large public one-to-many channels with “additional expressive features”, as Durov put it, or a special (or no) price for usage by traffic size, thus monetizing the app and saving their company.
