Telegram packs are sticker or emoji sets you find through search or shared links, and they don't pay Telegram directly. The money comes from elsewhere: Telegram Premium subscriptions, sponsored messages in public channels, and paid verification for businesses. Packs themselves stay free to keep users creating content and staying active inside the app. I've tested this myself running a small brand channel: the packs build engagement, then Telegram monetises that attention through ads and subscriptions instead of charging for stickers.
Useful alongside this: Where Can You Create WhatsApp Stickers With AI for Free?.
The short version: Neither app makes real money from you scrolling and chatting for free. WhatsApp makes its money charging businesses to message you, and Telegram makes its money from Premium subscriptions, in-channel ads, and a business subscription tier. Both are built so the free version stays free forever while someone else, usually a company trying to sell you something, quietly picks up the bill.
Useful alongside this: How to Use Telegram for Affiliate Marketing Campaigns in 2026.
Useful alongside this: make money online simple application.
I've spent the last few years running WhatsApp Business API campaigns for clients and watching my own Telegram channel numbers, so I've seen both sides of this. The bill lands on businesses, not on you, and once you understand where the money flows, you start using both apps differently.
WhatsApp barely makes money from being WhatsApp
Meta bought WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars in 2014, back when the app had no ads, no marketplace, and a founder who publicly hated the idea of advertising inside chat. For years it made almost nothing directly. That has changed, but not in the way people assume.
WhatsApp does not sell ads inside your personal chats the way Instagram sells ads in your feed. There is no sponsored message sitting between you and your mum. Instead, Meta charges businesses to talk to you through the WhatsApp Business Platform (the API version, not the free small business app most corner shops use). A business pays per 24-hour conversation window, and the rate depends on the country and the type of message: a delivery update (utility) is cheaper than a promotional offer (marketing), and an OTP login code (authentication) is cheaper still.
- In the US, marketing conversations have run from roughly 8 to 14 cents each
- Utility messages, like order confirmations, sit closer to 2 to 4 cents
- In India and parts of Southeast Asia, prices drop to under a cent for some categories
That sounds tiny until you multiply it. A retailer sending 500,000 delivery updates a month at 3 cents each is paying Meta 15,000 dollars a month, every month, forever, just to tell you your parcel is out for delivery. Multiply that across every airline, bank, food delivery app, and ecommerce store using WhatsApp for customer service worldwide, and you get a revenue line that analysts estimate runs into several billion dollars a year for Meta, even though the app has never shown you a single banner ad.
A real example: what this looks like from inside a business
A client of mine, a mid-sized online furniture retailer, moved abandoned cart recovery from email to WhatsApp Business API in 2025. Open rates on the WhatsApp messages sat around 70 percent compared to roughly 20 percent on email. The catch was cost. Each cart recovery message counted as a marketing conversation, and at scale their monthly WhatsApp messaging bill went from zero to just under 3,000 dollars. Recovered sales more than covered it, so the deal made sense for them, but it made the underlying point obvious: WhatsApp's business model is Meta taxing every company that wants to reach you where you read messages.
Telegram runs a completely different playbook
Telegram doesn't have Meta's ad empire to lean on, so Pavel Durov built three separate revenue streams that stack on top of each other.
Telegram Premium
Launched in 2022, Telegram Premium costs around 4.99 dollars a month (cheaper in some regions, closer to 2.99 dollars) and gets you bigger file uploads, faster download speeds, no ads inside public channels you follow, exclusive stickers, and a handful of vanity features like animated profile pictures. Durov has said Premium subscriptions became the company's biggest single revenue driver, and by 2024 he stated Telegram had crossed into profitability with reported revenue above 500 million dollars for the year, largely on the back of tens of millions of Premium subscribers.
In-channel advertising
This is the one most people never notice. If you own a public Telegram channel with more than 1,000 subscribers, Telegram can serve short, text-only sponsored messages (up to 160 characters, no images) inside it through its own Ad Platform, and channel owners get a cut of that ad revenue once they hit certain thresholds. It is a much blunter tool than a Facebook ad, but for niche channels, crypto-news channels, football fan channels, local deals channels, it works because the audience is already opted in and highly engaged. If you run a channel and are weighing that against other ways of earning from home, it's worth comparing the effort against something more predictable, like the pay ranges covered in my guide to getting hired as a virtual assistant, before you bet your income on ad share from a channel that might shrink overnight.
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Telegram Business
In 2024, Telegram added a business subscription tier aimed at small companies: custom greeting messages, business hours, quick replies, and a storefront-style bot setup, sold as a monthly add-on. It is a smaller line than Premium or ads, but it shows the same pattern as WhatsApp: businesses, not casual users, are the ones asked to pay.
The bit both companies would rather you didn't think about
Here's the uncomfortable part. Both apps market themselves on privacy and the promise that they will never sell your data or clutter your chats with ads, and on a technical level that is broadly true, WhatsApp really is end-to-end encrypted, and Telegram really doesn't insert ads into your one-to-one conversations. But "the app is free and private" and "nobody profits from your attention" are two different claims, and only the first one is honest. Every business that pays Meta to message you on WhatsApp is doing it because your attention on that app is worth more to them than an email or an SMS. Every brand running a sponsored message in a Telegram channel is paying for the exact same thing: your attention, sold in bulk, just one layer removed from you personally. The apps didn't remove the ad economy from messaging. They moved it upstream, so it feels invisible while it still funds the whole thing. That matters practically. If you run a business and you're not paying to reach customers on WhatsApp or Telegram yet, you're behind competitors who already worked out that a 3 cent message with a 70 percent open rate beats a 30 cent Google ad click with a 2 percent conversion rate.
What this means if you run a business
Once you strip away the mythology, both platforms boil down to a simple trade: free reach for individuals, paid reach for companies. If you're deciding where to put budget, here's how I'd think about it based on running both.
- Use WhatsApp Business API for transactional, high-trust messages: order updates, appointment reminders, support. The open rates justify the per-conversation cost far better than for cold promotional blasts.
- Use Telegram for building a community you own outright, since channels and groups aren't throttled by an algorithm the way a Facebook Page is, then layer sponsored messages or Premium-style perks in once you have real numbers, not before.
- Track cost per conversation on WhatsApp monthly. Prices creep up as Meta adjusts category rates, and a campaign that made sense at 3 cents a message can quietly become unprofitable at 9 cents if nobody's watching.
- Don't confuse a big subscriber count on Telegram with income. A channel needs roughly 1,000 subscribers before it's even eligible for Telegram's Ad Platform, and payout per view is small, so most channel owners make more money selling their own product or service through the channel than from the ad share itself.
If any of this is making you think about hiring someone to sort out your messaging and automation instead of guessing, that's a fair reaction, plenty of small businesses get this wrong for a year before asking for help, and there's a reasonable breakdown of costs in my piece on how much an AI consultant costs.
Curious what you could automate first? Run your numbers through my free AI calculator.
If that raises the next question, see It's Not About the Money.
Frequently asked questions
Does WhatsApp show ads inside personal chats?
No. WhatsApp does not place ads between your one-to-one or group messages. Its revenue comes from charging businesses per conversation through the WhatsApp Business Platform, not from advertising to individual users inside their chat threads.
Is Telegram Premium worth it for a regular user?
For most casual users, no, the free version does everything you need. It becomes worth the roughly 5 dollars a month if you regularly hit upload limits, follow lots of ad-supported public channels and want them ad-free, or use Telegram heavily for work and want faster downloads and larger group limits.
How much does it cost a business to message customers on WhatsApp?
It depends on country and message category, but businesses typically pay anywhere from under a cent to around 15 cents per 24-hour conversation, with promotional marketing messages costing more than transactional utility messages like order updates.
Can you make real money running a Telegram channel?
A small number of channel owners with large, active audiences make meaningful money through Telegram's Ad Platform once they pass 1,000 subscribers, but for most people the bigger opportunity is using the channel to sell their own product, service, or affiliate offer directly, rather than relying on Telegram's ad revenue share alone.
