A few months ago I launched a paid Telegram bot. No Stripe, no checkout page, no app-store account. The whole subscription runs on Telegram Stars — Telegram's own in-app virtual currency. People had questions. The most useful answer was the math, which nobody publishes openly. So here it is.
The setup
PolySignal is a Telegram bot that alerts users when top wallets on Polymarket make a trade. It has a free tier and two paid tiers (Signal 150⭐/month, Pro 750⭐/month). Subscriptions are recurring, billed every 30 days, cancellable in two taps inside Telegram. No payment provider, no checkout flow, no shipping address fields.
If you've never sold anything in Telegram: you're missing one of the cleanest payment surfaces on the internet. There's also one inconvenience hidden in the math. Both worth knowing about.
How users pay
