Telegram has become the platform of choice for creators, tipsters, educators and paid communities in Europe and Latin America. With more than 950 million active users and no algorithm filtering your content, a well-run Telegram group can generate real recurring income.
But monetizing isn't just "setting a price." You need to pick the right format, set up payments, accept money from audiences in different countries and measure what works. This guide covers the whole process: from creating the group to advanced monetization strategies and how to charge your community worldwide without losing sales.
Short answer: To monetize a Telegram group in 2026, run a free public channel to attract an audience and a private paid group for exclusive value. The most common revenue models are paid subscriptions, digital products, paid signals/tipsters, courses, affiliates, sponsored posts, consulting and exclusive networks. If part of your audience can't use an international card, accept local payment methods by country (PIX, Nequi, OXXO, Mercado Pago) — a card-only checkout can lose 40–70% of sales. Recurring subscriptions are charged by card; local methods like PIX or OXXO work as one-off payments or link-based renewals. Tools like Kunfupay automate member access (add and remove on payment) natively inside Telegram.
Telegram group vs channel: which is better for monetization?
Before you monetize, you need to decide on the format. A channel is one-way broadcasting: you publish, your audience reads. A group allows two-way conversation: everyone can take part.
For monetization, the difference is key. A channel works well for distributing trading signals, alerts or newsletter-style content. A group works better when the value is in interaction: answering questions, sharing experiences, networking or giving personalized support.
The most effective strategy in 2026 combines both. A free public channel that attracts an audience and proves value, and a private paid group where members get exclusive content and direct interaction with you.
A few data points to help you decide: channels have no subscriber limit and show per-message view metrics. Groups support up to 200,000 members and allow threads, topics and reactions. If your business model depends on community and active participation, the group is your main tool.
How to create and set up your Telegram group to sell
Creating the group is technically simple: open Telegram, tap "New Group," choose a name, photo and description. What matters is the strategic setup.
The name should include your main keyword. If you sell trading signals, something like "Trading Pro — Premium Signals" works better than a generic name. The description is your sales pitch: explain what the member gets, what content frequency they can expect and how to join.
Set it up as a private group with an invite link. This lets you control who gets in. Turn on chat history for new members so they see the accumulated value when they join. Use topics if your content covers several areas: one topic for signals, another for general discussion, another for resources.
Pin a welcome message with the rules, the value proposition and a link to your checkout. Every new member should understand in 10 seconds what they'll find here and how to contribute.
If you use Kunfupay, you can skip much of this manual setup. The platform lets you create the Telegram group automatically when you set up a product or subscription, and its bot handles personalized welcome messages and access management from day one.
What are the best ways to monetize a Telegram group? (8 strategies)
1. Monthly premium subscriptions
The most direct strategy and the one that generates the most predictable income. You charge a monthly or annual fee for access to your private group.
The model works especially well for tipsters, market analysts, educators and specialized content creators. With 100 members at €19/month you generate €1,900 in recurring monthly revenue. With 500 at €29/month, you pass €14,000.
The key is retention. If your content doesn't refresh constantly, your churn rate will be high. Publish exclusive content at least 3–5 times a week, run weekly live sessions and answer questions actively.
The biggest challenge for creators with an audience in LATAM is collecting payment. Cards work across much of Europe, but in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Brazil or Venezuela, a large share of your audience doesn't have an international card. With Kunfupay you can offer a checkout with local payment methods such as PIX, Nequi, OXXO, Mercado Pago, Yape and Pago Móvil, which can lift your conversion rate by up to 90% versus a card-only checkout.
One important detail on recurring billing: automatic renewals run on cards (and methods that support recurrence, such as Nequi). Methods like PIX, boleto or OXXO are one-off payments — they don't silently auto-renew. The right way to serve a LATAM audience is to charge recurring subscriptions by card, while letting members pay (including renewals) via PIX, boleto or OXXO through a payment link, with automatic reminders from the bot before access expires.
On top of that, Kunfupay has a native Telegram integration: its bot connects directly to your group to handle automatic member adds and removals based on subscription status. When someone pays, they get access to the private group without you lifting a finger. When they stop paying, the bot removes them automatically. Zero manual work.
2. Selling digital products
Ebooks, templates, spreadsheets, presets, scripts, databases, recorded courses. You create the product once and sell it indefinitely with margins close to 100%.
Your Telegram group is the perfect distribution channel: you already have a qualified audience. Spot which questions come up most often in your group and turn that solution into a product. If people ask you every week how to set something up, create a step-by-step guide and sell it.
You can sell with a simple payment link shared in the group. Platforms like Kunfupay let you create checkouts for digital products with automatic delivery after payment, compatible with local payment methods across LATAM and beyond.
3. Tipsters and paid signals
The most widespread model on Telegram. Sports tipsters, crypto analysts, trading signals, betting picks. The audience pays to access your predictions or analysis in real time.
Success depends on your verifiable track record. Publish a transparent history of results, use a free channel to show some signals and direct people to the paid group for the full content.
For creators with an audience in LATAM, charging with local payment methods is essential. A creator who only accepts cards loses between 40% and 70% of conversions in countries like Colombia or Mexico, where the penetration of international credit cards is low.
4. Courses and live training
Your group becomes a virtual classroom. You offer training in a cohort format: a group with a start and end date where members receive lessons, exercises and personalized feedback.
It works very well for digital marketing, programming, design, trading, languages or any skill that can be taught progressively. The price per cohort is usually higher than a monthly subscription because the perceived value is higher.
Combine text messages with voice notes, shared documents and group video calls. Telegram supports all of this within the same group.
5. Affiliate marketing
You recommend products or services relevant to your niche and earn a commission for each sale. Your members pay nothing extra and you monetize the trust you've built.
It works especially well in niches like software, digital tools, hosting, brokers and financial services. The key is to recommend only what you actually know and use. Be transparent: always disclose when it's an affiliate link.
A group with 500 active members can generate between €200 and €3,000/month in affiliate commissions depending on the niche and the commissions available.
6. Advertising and shoutouts
If your group has a relevant volume of active members, other brands and creators will want to advertise in it. You can charge to publish promotional messages, mentions or recommendations.
The price depends on the size and engagement of your group. A group of 5,000 active members in a profitable niche can charge between €50 and €500 per sponsored post. Limit the frequency to 1–2 ads per week so you don't saturate your community.
This is where the problem of bots and fraud comes in. If someone wants to pay you for advertising and their group has bought members, you're paying for thin air. Later on we explain how to use Kunfupay to manage these payments safely.
7. Consulting and mentoring services
Your free or low-cost group proves your expertise. From there, you offer 1:1 consulting or premium mentoring services at a higher price.
It works for marketing consultants, financial advisors, business coaches, nutritionists or any professional who can offer personalized attention. The group acts as a funnel: members see your knowledge daily, and those who want personalized treatment hire your premium service.
8. Access to an exclusive network
In some niches, the value isn't in the content but in the connections. A group that brings together investors, entrepreneurs, professionals in a sector or decision-makers can charge a high membership simply for access to that network.
These groups usually have high prices (€50–500/month) and small member counts. Exclusivity is part of the value.
How do you charge your Telegram community worldwide?
This is where most creators lose money without knowing it. If your audience includes members in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru or Chile, offering only credit cards as a payment method means losing between 40% and 70% of your potential sales.
The penetration of international credit cards in LATAM is far lower than in Europe. In Mexico, millions of people pay in cash at OXXO. In Brazil, PIX moves more money than cards. In Colombia, Nequi and PSE are the dominant methods. In Venezuela, Pago Móvil is practically the only viable channel.
With a gateway like Kunfupay you can accept all these local payment methods from a single checkout. The flow is simple: you create your product or subscription in Kunfupay, share the payment link in your Telegram group, and each member pays with the method available in their country. You receive settlement in EUR or USD.
This isn't a minor detail. For a creator with 1,000 followers in a free channel where 60% are LATAM audience, moving from a card-only checkout to one with local methods can mean tripling paying members.
Kunfupay also includes a CRM with artificial intelligence that lets you manage active subscriptions, see which members are up to date with their payments and automate renewal reminders. Ideal for managing access to your paid group without manual processes.
How do you automate member access and payments in a Telegram group?
An active Telegram group generates constant work: welcoming new members, moderating spam, answering repeated questions, publishing scheduled content. Without automation, this eats up hours of your day.
Kunfupay offers a complete set of free Telegram group management tools that cover the whole cycle, not just payments.
On the community management side, Kunfupay includes automatic personalized welcome messages for every new member who joins the group, with the rules, the value proposition and a direct link to your checkout. It also allows automatic Telegram group creation from the Kunfupay panel itself: when you set up a new product or subscription, you can generate the associated group automatically without leaving the platform. This saves time and avoids manual setup errors.
On the access and payment management side, the Kunfupay bot connects to your group and automates the whole flow: when a member pays their subscription, they get automatic access to the private group. When the subscription expires or is cancelled, the bot removes them with no action on your part. It also sends renewal reminders before the membership expires, reducing involuntary churn.
On the advertising measurement side, Kunfupay generates unique tracking links for each campaign. If you pay for a shoutout in another group, you can measure exactly how many real members arrive, what their activity rate is and how many convert to paid. This lets you detect groups with inflated engagement and optimize your ad spend with real data.
The best part is that all these tools are free inside Kunfupay. You don't need to pay for additional third-party bots, or set up complex integrations with Zapier or Make. You connect your group, set up your product or subscription, and the system takes care of the rest.
If you need specific advanced moderation features (anti-flood, explicit content filtering, warning systems for infractions) you can complement with specialized bots like Rose Bot or Group Help. But for managing the group as a business end to end — welcomes, access, payments, advertising metrics — Kunfupay covers it natively and at no additional cost.
Analytics: what to measure in your Telegram group
You can't improve what you don't measure. The key metrics for a monetized group are different from those of a free group.
The indicators you should track are the conversion rate from free member to paying member, monthly churn (what percentage cancels each month), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), daily active members versus total members and the average length of time a subscriber stays.
Telegram offers basic statistics for groups of more than 500 members: member count, message volume and activity graphs. For deeper analytics you can use external tools like Combot or TGStat.
But the metrics that really matter for monetization — conversion, churn, MRR — come from your payment gateway, not from Telegram. The Kunfupay panel shows you this data in real time: how much you bill, who pays, who cancels and the lifetime value of each subscriber.
Thanks to the direct integration with Telegram, Kunfupay also cross-references payment data with group activity: you can see which members are up to date, which are close to cancelling and which haven't interacted in a while (a signal of a possible cancellation). Its CRM with artificial intelligence lets you segment members and launch personalized actions to retain those at risk of churn.
But where Kunfupay goes beyond a conventional payment gateway is in its campaign and inbound-link measurement tool. From the panel you can create unique tracking links for each traffic source: one link for the shoutout you paid for in another group, another for your post on Instagram, another for the banner on your blog. Each link records who arrived via that path, who ended up buying your content or subscription, and how much revenue it generated.
This lets you calculate the real ROAS (return on ad spend) of each campaign. If you paid €200 for a shoutout in a Telegram group and that link generated 15 subscribers at €29/month, you know the campaign generates €435/month of MRR with a ROAS of 2.17x in the first month. If the average retention is 4 months, the real value of that campaign is €1,740 on an investment of €200.
Without this measurement, most creators pay for advertising blind: they don't know which channel brings members who actually pay or which one has a ridiculously low conversion rate. With Kunfupay's tracking links you can cut the sources that don't perform and double down on the ones that work, making decisions based on real sales data, not on impressions or empty clicks.
Should you buy Telegram members or grow organically?
It's tempting to buy members when your group has 50 people and the competition has 10,000. But buying members is almost always a bad investment.
The services that sell members use bots, incentivized accounts or forced additions. None of them give you real members who interact or pay. What you get is an inflated number that destroys your engagement rate: if you have 100 real members and buy 5,000 bots, your engagement drops from 25% to 0.5%. New visitors see a group of 5,100 people where nobody talks, and they leave.
What's more, Telegram detects and purges bot accounts periodically. Your counter can drop overnight. And if the bought members report your group as spam, Telegram can restrict or ban it outright.
Organic growth is slower but sustainable. Publish valuable content in your free channel, take part in groups in your niche, collaborate with other creators, use SEO on your blog to attract traffic to your Telegram funnel. 100 real members who interact are worth more than 10,000 phantom accounts.
If you're considering investing in paid growth (shoutouts, collaborations, cross-promotions), make sure you measure quality before spending. Kunfupay includes a free tool to analyze Telegram groups: you can see the estimated percentage of bots, the real activity of members and the genuine engagement of any group before paying for a promotion in it. This saves you the money you'd lose paying for advertising in inflated groups.
Paid advertising in other groups: how to do it without fraud
A legitimate growth strategy is to pay other group admins to promote your community. It works if you do it right, but fraud is real.
The main problem is that many groups inflate their numbers with bought members. You pay €200 for a shoutout in a group of "50,000 members" and get 3 visits because 99% are bots.
Before paying for advertising in another group, you should verify its real engagement. Look at the ratio of messages per member, check whether the same users participate or whether the replies look generic, ask for screenshots of the analytics panel and request a small test before committing to a large package.
To manage these payments safely, you can use Kunfupay as an intermediary. Kunfupay lets you send money to other creators for free, wherever they are. If you want to pay a shoutout to an admin in Mexico, Colombia or any other LATAM country, you don't need to make international transfers with fees or look for alternative payment methods. From your Kunfupay panel you send the payment directly and the creator receives it in their local currency at no cost to either party.
You can also structure the payment conditional on results: the group admin receives the money when real conversions are verified (new active members, minimum conversion rate). This protects your investment and discourages fraud.
But the most powerful part is the free promotion-quality measurement tool that Kunfupay includes. Before paying a single cent, you can analyze the real quality of a Telegram group: the estimated percentage of bots versus real users, the real activity of members (messages, reactions, participation frequency) and the genuine engagement ratio. After the promotion, the unique tracking links show you how many real members arrived, how many converted to paid and what the real ROAS of the campaign was.
This completely changes the dynamics of advertising on Telegram. You no longer pay blind hoping for results: you have data before (group quality), during (link tracking) and after (conversion to paid) each campaign. All free inside Kunfupay.
The same logic applies if you're the admin and others want to advertise in your group. Offering verifiable engagement and conversion metrics through Kunfupay positions you as a serious partner to advertisers and justifies higher prices per post. You can also receive advertiser payments from any country directly through Kunfupay, no matter where the advertiser is.
Common mistakes when monetizing on Telegram
The most frequent mistakes we see in creators monetizing for the first time on Telegram are launching the paid group without validating demand in a free channel, setting too high a price from the start without a proven track record, not offering local payment methods when your audience is in LATAM, managing access manually (copying and pasting invite links) and not measuring churn or MRR because you're busy creating content.
The solution to most of these problems is to systematize. Use tools that automate access, payment and metrics. Your time should go into creating the content that retains members, not into operational tasks that software can solve.
From free group to profitable business: the path
Monetizing a Telegram group isn't magic. It's a process that requires consistent content, an active community, a clear value proposition and a payment system that doesn't lose sales to payment limitations.
The typical path starts with a free public channel where you prove value for 2–4 weeks. When you have at least 200–300 followers, you launch the paid group with a launch offer. You optimize price, content and payment methods based on the data you gather.
If your audience includes LATAM, set up a checkout with local payment methods from day one. Don't wait until you lose sales to realize your audience can't pay you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it better to use a Telegram group or a channel to make money?
A channel broadcasts one-way and suits signals, alerts or newsletter-style content. A group enables two-way interaction and works best when the value is community, support or networking. The strongest 2026 setup combines both: a free channel for reach and a private paid group for exclusive access.
How much can you earn with a paid Telegram group?
It depends on members and price. 100 members at €19/month is €1,900 in monthly recurring revenue; 500 at €29/month exceeds €14,000. Retention is the key variable — publish exclusive content several times a week to keep churn low.
How do I charge members who don't have an international card?
Use a gateway with local payment methods. In LATAM many users pay with PIX, Nequi, OXXO or Mercado Pago, not international cards. A multi-method checkout like Kunfupay's can lift conversion sharply versus a card-only checkout.
Can I charge recurring subscriptions with PIX or OXXO?
Automatic recurring renewals run on cards (and methods that support recurrence). PIX, boleto and OXXO are one-off payments: you collect each renewal via a payment link, and an automated bot can send reminders. So you can still serve LATAM audiences — just not as silent auto-renewal on those methods.
How do I automatically add and remove paid members?
Connect a tool that integrates natively with Telegram. Kunfupay's bot grants group access when a member pays and removes them when the subscription lapses or is cancelled, with no manual work — plus renewal reminders to reduce involuntary churn.
Is buying Telegram members worth it?
Almost never. Bought members are bots or incentivized accounts that don't engage or pay, they crush your engagement rate, and Telegram purges them periodically. Organic growth plus fraud-checked paid shoutouts (measuring real engagement before paying) is far more sustainable.
