What a creator keeps from a Telegram Star

Telegram publishes exactly one figure for what a seller earns on a Star, and it has not moved since Stars launched. The Bot Platform Developer Terms of Service say it in a single sentence:

Developers can receive an equivalent of 0.013 USD worth of rewards for each Telegram Star.

The Terms of Service for Content Creators repeat the same rate for channel owners selling paid posts: an equivalent of 0.013 USD per Star unlocked. One rate, both surfaces.

What is not fixed is what the fan pays to get that Star. There are two published prices, they differ by a third, and the difference goes to Apple and Google.

The two prices a fan can pay

Telegram publishes its in app price list on the Bot Payments page, under the heading Star Pricing, as a table with five columns: Star Amount, Price for Users, Apple / Google 30% Commission, Telegram Administrative Costs, Developer Proceeds. These are the published rows at the ends and the middle of that table.

Telegram attaches a caveat to the table: it shows estimates for a purchase in the App Store or Play Store, billed in USD at 0% VAT, and any difference is caused by the buyer's location, the payment provider or local law.

The second price is on Fragment, the platform Telegram outsources Star sales and payouts to. Its package list, read on 2026-09-14, prices Stars at a flat 0.015 USD each at every size: 50 Stars for $0.75, 1,000 for $15, 10,000 for $150, and on up to 10,000,000 for $150,000. Payment there is in crypto: GRAM, TON, USDT or USDC.

So the same 1,000 Stars cost the fan $19.99 through an app store and $15.00 through Fragment, and the seller receives $13.00 either way.

The two worked examples

A fan spends 100 Stars on a paid post. The seller's balance rises by 100 Stars, worth $1.30 at Telegram's published reward rate. If the fan bought those Stars inside the iOS or Android app, the fan paid $1.99: $0.60 went to the store, $0.09 to Telegram's stated administrative costs, $1.30 to the seller. If the fan bought them on Fragment, the fan paid $1.50 and the seller still receives $1.30.

A fan spends 1,000 Stars. The seller receives $13.00. Bought in app, the fan paid $19.99. Bought on Fragment, $15.00.

Expressed as a share of what the fan actually spent, the seller keeps a little over 65% on an in app purchase and 86.7% on a Fragment purchase. Those two percentages are this desk's arithmetic on Telegram's and Fragment's published price lists, not figures either company publishes.

The 30% is real, but Telegram never writes it as a rule

The only place Telegram states the store commission is the column header of that pricing table: Apple / Google 30% Commission. The Bot Developer Terms and the Stars Terms of Service contain no revenue share percentage at all, and no 70/30 sentence. What the Terms do contain is the reason the stores are in the transaction in the first place:

Due to requirements from stores that host Telegram apps, transactions for digital goods and services cannot be processed through third-party payment providers. Accordingly, all transactions pertaining to digital goods and services must be executed exclusively through the exchange of Telegram Stars.

The payments documentation puts the same rule in operational terms: digital goods must be priced in the currency tag XTR, and asked whether crypto can be accepted instead, the page answers "No".

Telegram's own description of its position is that it takes "practically no commission from transactions in Stars, so only taxes and payment system fees will apply", written in the blog post of 2024-06-30 that switched Star payouts on. Both statements are true at once. The administrative line in Telegram's table runs at roughly 5% of the fan's payment. The 30% is the store's.

Telegram also reserves the rate itself. The Developer Terms state that Telegram determines the monetary value it assigns to Stars in its sole discretion, that the value has no connection to what Stars cost to buy in any region, and that it may fluctuate, while adding that frequent changes are not anticipated.

Getting the money out

Withdrawal is a separate set of published rules, and several of them surprise people who have only read the marketing.

• Minimum balance. The client configuration publishes stars_revenue_withdrawal_min with a default of 1,000 Stars, described as the minimum required balance to allow a withdrawal. At the published reward rate that is $13.00.
• Maximum per withdrawal. stars_revenue_withdrawal_max is published at 25,000,000 Stars. To take out more, the process is repeated.
• The wait. The Developer Terms state that Stars may not become available for rewards for up to 21 days after their receipt. The Content Creator Terms give the same 21 days for Star balances, against 2 days for Gram balances.
• The route. The API documentation describes withdrawal as a call that requires the account's two factor password and returns a one time Fragment URL, where the seller submits the TON wallet address that receives the funds.
• The clock. Stars earned are valid for 3 years from the date they were received. Stars not spent or withdrawn within that window are described as forfeit and debited from the balance.
• Finality. Reward withdrawals are neither reversible nor refundable, including where the seller used an incorrect wallet, and a balance in an account the seller loses access to is considered forfeit.

Telegram also publishes a clawback. If a payment dispute ends in a refund to the buyer, the seller is responsible for the returned funds, which are deducted from the balance, and Telegram states it may withhold or debit Stars in response to refunds of in app purchases or suspected abuse.

The other Star rates Telegram publishes

Not every Star transaction pays out at the same share of the Stars themselves.

• Paid messages. The Stars Terms state that users who charge to receive a message "receive 85% of the Stars paid to send each message". The client configuration carries the matching key at 850 per thousand.
• Resold collectible gifts. The configuration publishes a resale commission of 800 per thousand, that is 80% to the seller.
• Star reactions. Telegram's blog of 2024-08-14 states that channel owners "receive 100% of the stars" sent as a Star reaction. That is 100% of the Stars, which still convert out at 0.013 USD each.
• Subscriptions. Paid channel invite links and bot subscriptions are billed in Stars on a fixed 30 day period, capped at 10,000 Stars per period. No separate share is published, so the same reward rate applies.
• A fee most sellers will not have read. Enabling topics in private chats for a bot subjects every subsequent Star purchase in that bot to a non refundable 15% fee withheld by Telegram, for as long as the setting stays on.

What Telegram does not publish

Three things are absent, and the absence matters more than a rounded figure would.

There is no refund window. The Bot API method that refunds a Star payment takes a user and a charge identifier and states no deadline anywhere. The 21 days that circulate as a refund window are the withdrawal holding period, which is a different rule in a different document.

There is no stated Fragment fee on Star rewards. Fragment publishes a 5% platform fee and a small blockchain fee, but on collectibles, not on Star payouts. What it does publish is the mechanism: the USD value is calculated by Telegram and relayed, and Fragment converts it at a market rate refreshed about every five minutes, so the amount of crypto that lands depends on the moment of conversion.

There is no effective date on any of the four terms pages read for this entry. None of them carries a version number. Clauses that plainly did not exist in mid 2024, such as the 15% topics fee and the broadcast messaging fees, cannot be dated from the pages themselves.

One number to carry away

A Telegram Star is worth 0.013 USD to the person selling. Everything else in this entry is about who takes what before it gets there, and how long it waits before it can leave. Any fee charged on top by an agency or a chat tool comes out of that 0.013, not out of the fan's price; the public rates for those tools are in the AI chatting tools pricing table.