The request arrives in almost identical wording every few months. A client has a Telegram audience, a course or a paid community to sell, and a developer who has already been told to just add a card form to the bot. Sometimes there is a payment provider account sitting ready. The answer is that this cannot be built the way they imagine, and the reason is not a Telegram quirk that a clever workaround gets around. It is app store policy, passed straight through to you.<\/p>\n
This piece sets out what the rule actually says, why it exists, what a compliant bot has to implement, who carries the chargeback, and what the Stars conversion rate does to your pricing before you ever quote a number.<\/p>\n
Telegram splits its payments documentation into two halves, and the split is the whole story. The page on physical goods and services<\/a> covers ordinary currencies and third-party payment providers. The page on digital goods and services<\/a> covers everything else, and it is unambiguous:<\/p>\n All payments via bots and mini apps for digital goods and services inside Telegram apps must exclusively use Telegram Stars, in order to comply with the guidelines of the App Store and Play Store.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Mechanically that means the currency field of your invoice carries the tag XTR, the provider_token<\/strong> parameter is left empty because there is no third party in the loop, and the user pays with Stars they acquired from Telegram beforehand. Stars arrived in Bot API 7.4 in May 2024, with transaction listing following in 7.5 and recurring Star subscriptions in 8.0 that November. The Bot API changelog<\/a> is the only place worth checking for what the current method surface looks like, because it moves several times a year.<\/p>\n A rule you understand is a rule you can plan around. Telegram states the reason in its own FAQ rather than leaving it to interpretation: to remain in compliance with Google’s payment policies and with Apple’s review guidelines 3.1.1, 3.1.1(a) and 3.1.3(b), a bot or mini app must use Stars for digital goods sold inside Telegram apps, regardless of any other web portals or payment providers you may have set up outside the Telegram ecosystem.<\/p>\n The logic is short. Telegram is an application distributed through the App Store<\/a> and Google Play<\/a>. Both stores require that digital content consumed inside an app be sold through their own in-app purchase systems. Telegram Stars are that in-app purchase, wrapped so that thousands of independent bots can share one compliant rail. Your bot lives inside Telegram, so your bot inherits the obligation.<\/p>\nWhy the restriction exists, and why that matters<\/h2>\n