Short answer: Telegram extraction tools price in three incompatible ways. Browser extensions charge a flat monthly fee for a volume allowance — Mastros is $0, $9 or $18 a month. Cloud platforms like Apify charge for what a run consumes, so cost scales with the job. Open-source tools like Telethon and Telegram Desktop's own export cost nothing in money and cost engineering time instead. Comparing the headline numbers across those three models is close to meaningless; comparing cost-per-job is not.
Why Telegram scraper pricing is hard to compare
Three pricing models, and the unit differs in each.
Flat subscription with a volume cap. You pay a fixed monthly fee and get an allowance — profiles, messages or records. Predictable, and you pay the same in a quiet month. This is how browser extensions price, Mastros included.
Usage-based cloud billing. You pay for compute, proxy traffic and storage that a run consumes. A tiny job costs almost nothing; a huge one costs real money. Excellent when your volume is spiky, harder to budget when it is not.
Free, with a time cost. Open-source libraries and the native export cost zero. The bill arrives as engineering hours: credentials, session handling, pagination, rate-limit backoff, and maintenance every time Telegram changes something.
The question that cuts through all three: what does one month of my actual workload cost? A team exporting one 5,000-member group monthly and a team crawling 500 public channels daily will get opposite answers from the same table.
The pricing table
| Tool | Model | Free tier | Paid entry | Top tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mastros | Flat monthly | 250 profiles + 300 messages/mo, all extractors | $9/mo — 5,000 profiles, 10,000 messages | $18/mo — 100,000 profiles, 500,000 messages | No card for free; each media file counts as one message |
| Apify actors | Usage-based | Free plan with $5 of usage a month, no card | Starter: $19 a month of prepaid usage, then pay as you go | Scale $199, Business $999 a month | Actor pricing varies by author; unused prepaid usage expires monthly |
| Thunderbit | Flat monthly | Trial / limited free | See pricing page | See pricing page | General web scraper, not Telegram-specific |
| TeleSender | Flat monthly | Limited | See pricing page | See pricing page | Outreach tool; extraction is a feature of it |
| Telethon | Free (MIT) | Unlimited | — | — | Costs developer time; Telegram's own rate limits apply |
| Telegram Desktop export | Free | Unlimited, own account | — | — | HTML/JSON only, no CSV, no member lists |
| Generic store extensions | Mixed | Often 20–100 rows | Varies | Varies | Check where data is processed before price |
Mastros figures are current and Apify's were read from its pricing page on 5 September 2026. The Thunderbit and TeleSender cells stay "see pricing page": Thunderbit renders its plans in the browser only and showed no figures to a fetch, TeleSender's page was not read, and a wrong number about someone else's product is worse than a blank cell.
What Mastros costs, precisely
| Plan | Price | Profiles / month | Messages / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 | 300 |
| Pro | $9 | 5,000 | 10,000 |
| Scale | $18 | 100,000 | 500,000 |
Those are Telegram's numbers. WhatsApp shares Pro and Scale and has a smaller free tier (100 and 100). LinkedIn counts records instead — 250 free, 10,000 on Pro with rollover, no limit from us on Scale.
Two caveats we would rather state than have you discover. Each downloaded media file counts as one message against the monthly quota, so a bulk media run consumes allowance faster than a member export. And Scale is a large ceiling rather than an unlimited one on the chat products.
The tier detail sits on the Telegram scraper page.
Cost per job, which is the number that matters
Take three realistic workloads and the model that wins each:
One 5,000-member group, once. Mastros Pro: $9 for the month, then cancel, or stretch it across two free months. Apify: pennies of usage, plus the setup time to configure an actor. Telethon: free, plus an afternoon. Winner: whichever you already have. At this size the price difference is noise.
A 20,000-member community, exported monthly, plus message history. Mastros Scale at $18 covers it comfortably and predictably. An Apify actor could too, at usage cost that depends on the run. Telethon is free but you are now maintaining a script. Winner: flat subscription, because the workload is steady and budgeting matters more than marginal cost.
500 public channels, crawled daily, into a warehouse. A browser extension is the wrong shape — no scheduler, no headless mode, and a human starting each run. Winner: a cloud actor, clearly, and the usage bill is the correct cost of a job that genuinely needs that infrastructure. We say the same thing at more length in Mastros vs Apify.
The costs that are not on any pricing page
Your data on someone else's servers. A cloud tool processes your member list on infrastructure you cannot audit. That is not a line item, but under GDPR it is a processor relationship with paperwork attached. Local processing has no such cost because there is no such copy.
Engineering time on the free options. Telethon is free the way a kit car is free. Credentials, sessions, pagination, backoff, and maintenance whenever Telegram shifts. At a loaded developer rate, a week of that costs more than several years of any subscription here.
Row caps that turn free into a demo. Several free extensions stop at 20 to 100 records — enough to see it work, not enough to use. Check the cap before you count something as free.
Account risk from the wrong tool. A tool built around automated sending puts your account at risk of limits or a ban. The cost of losing the account that holds your communities dwarfs every number in this post.
FAQ
How much does a Telegram scraper cost?
Anywhere from nothing to usage-based cloud billing. Browser extensions with flat plans sit at roughly $9 to $18 a month for meaningful volume — Mastros is exactly $9 and $18. Open-source libraries and Telegram's own export are free. Cloud platforms charge for what a run consumes, so there is no single figure.
Is there a free Telegram scraper?
Several. Telegram Desktop's built-in export is free and unlimited for your own account. Telethon is free and open source. Browser extensions offer free tiers — Mastros' covers 250 profiles and 300 messages a month with every extractor unlocked, and does not expire.
Is Apify cheaper than a subscription tool?
For occasional small jobs, usually yes — usage-based billing charges almost nothing for a light run. For steady monthly workloads, a flat subscription is usually cheaper and always more predictable. For very large scheduled crawls, Apify's cost is real but so is the infrastructure you are renting.
Why do the free tiers differ so much between tools?
Because the unit differs. A tool counting rows, one counting API calls, and one counting compute minutes are not measuring the same thing. Convert to your own workload before comparing — a "1,000 free credits" tier can be larger or smaller than "250 free profiles" depending entirely on what a credit buys.
What does "each media file counts as one message" mean?
On Mastros, a bulk media download consumes the message allowance rather than a separate media quota — 300 files on the free plan uses the whole monthly message allowance. Worth planning around if media is your main use.
Related reading
- Best Telegram Scrapers in 2026 — the same seven tools on capability rather than cost.
- Telegram Scraper — the plans described above.