Telegram Ads Minimum Budget 2026: €500 to Start — €2M Is for Resellers
Advertisers do not need €2 million for Telegram Ads in 2026: that is the threshold for becoming a reseller that buys from Telegram directly, the level Adsly works at as an official Telegram Ads partner. Through Adsly a Euro account starts at €650 with €500 on the ad balance, €6,500 in nutra, adult, binary options and the gambling test launch, and from €31,250 for the official gambling account. Self-serve ads.telegram.org publishes no minimum deposit, only a 0.1 TON (Gram) minimum CPM.
Search “telegram ads minimum budget” and the first answers still say Telegram wants €2 million up front, half of it frozen as a deposit. Small advertisers read that and close the tab. They should not. €2 million is what it takes to work with Telegram directly as a reseller — the level an official partner like Adsly carries so that its clients don’t have to. An advertiser who opens through a partner starts from €500.
We have bought Telegram Ads since the platform’s first year, and Adsly Pro Panel holds 551,607 campaigns from 442 accounts with 1,285,233,150 impressions (measured 19 October 2026). Below: every real way to start and what each costs, where the €2 million came from, and what advertisers actually spend — per month, per campaign and in their first 30 days.
Telegram Ads minimum budget in 2026: the short answer
There is no €2 million minimum for advertisers. €2 million is the reseller threshold: the scale at which a company buys Telegram Ads directly and resells them, as Adsly does. These are the real routes into Telegram Ads for an advertiser and their entry cost on 19 October 2026.
| Route | To start | What the money is | Where the ad can link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve, ads.telegram.org | No published minimum deposit; minimum CPM 0.1 TON (Gram) | Your own balance in Gram | Telegram channels and bots only |
| Stars, for channel and bot owners | Stars your channel or bot already earned | $0.02 of ad credit per Star | Only that channel or bot |
| Euro account via Adsly: regular niches, forex, crypto, stocks, VPN, CPA, prop trading | €650 | €500 on the ad balance + €150 | Channels, bots, Mini Apps and your own website |
| Euro account via Adsly: nutra, adult, binary options, gambling test launch | €6,500 | €5,000 of ad budget + €1,500 | The same |
| Euro account via Adsly: official gambling account | from €31,250 | from €25,000 of ad budget | The same |
| Becoming a reseller: buying directly from Telegram and reselling | from €2 million — the partner level, not an advertiser budget | A partner-level commitment with Telegram | — |
Telegram’s own guide even says you “can also publish ads without a budget to get a feel for the platform”. The only floor Telegram itself publishes is the price of a thousand impressions, not the size of your wallet.
Where the €2 million figure came from
The number is real. It became public the week Telegram announced its ad platform, as the terms for buying from Telegram directly.
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Oct 2021 | The Bell and vc.ru report that the new ad cabinet asks for a €2 million advance, half frozen as a deposit that is returned only to advertisers who spent €10 million in 12 months; minimum CPM €2 | The Bell, vc.ru |
| Mar 2022 – Mar 2024 | Telegram’s getting-started page: minimum CPM €2; to fund an account a company filled in a request and received “documents for our advertising agreement and deposit transfer” — no amount on the page | archive, 17 Mar 2022, archive, 16 Mar 2024 |
| 28 Feb 2024 | Pavel Durov: “In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries”, with ads sold in Toncoin | t.me/durov/247 |
| Apr 2024 | The guide, now on ads.telegram.org: “The minimum CPM for a sponsored message is 0.1 Toncoin”; external links not allowed | archive, 22 Apr 2024 |
| 19 Oct 2026 | ads.telegram.org: “Anyone can post ads on Telegram — using this platform”, paid in Gram; no minimum deposit on the homepage, the guide or the Terms of Service | ads.telegram.org, Terms |
The Telegram channel “Kod Durova” spotted it first, and a Bell editor checked it by registering in the cabinet. The cabinet itself introduced the terms with a caveat, quoted by The Bell: they were “not part of any legal document”. And, as The Bell wrote, neither Durov’s announcement nor the platform’s public terms said anything about a minimum budget. What has stayed is the logic behind the number: €2 million is the scale of working with Telegram directly. That is the level an official partner like Adsly works at — and the reason an advertiser who opens through a partner never sees that number on an invoice.
What other pages say about it
Articles still quote it, and they are right about the direct route — but many readers take it as an advertiser’s minimum. Three examples we checked on 19 October 2026:
- pwskills.com, 19 November 2025: “If you try to go straight through Telegram, the minimum budget is huge. It is €2 million.”
- eLama blog, 19 October 2025: advertising in Telegram Ads directly is possible only with a budget from €2 million, of which €1 million is held as a deposit.
- kokoc.com, 2 June 2026: “напрямую — от 2 млн евро” (directly, from €2 million), split as €1 million deposit and €1 million budget.
None of this is written on Telegram’s advertiser pages, because it is not an advertiser’s requirement. The homepage, the getting-started guide and the Ad Platform Terms of Service were all read on 19 October 2026: the Terms define a “Maximum Budget” per ad that you set yourself, and give Telegram the right to change “the list of available Publication Spaces and minimum CPM” — a minimum deposit is not mentioned anywhere.
What advertisers really spend: lifetime per account
The best answer to “how much do I need” is what other advertisers spend. Adsly Pro Panel syncs every campaign of every connected account; spend is in each account’s own currency and is never added across currencies.
| Lifetime spend per account | Euro accounts | TON-currency accounts |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts with spend | 112 | 266 |
| 75th percentile | €1,524 | 2,417 TON |
| 90th percentile | €8,634 | 9,306 TON |
Measured in Adsly Pro Panel on 19 October 2026; Euro ads from 2 October 2023, TON ads from 18 April 2024.
A quarter of Euro accounts have spent more than €1,524 and one in ten more than €8,634 — and not one of them needed €2 million: that threshold belongs to the reseller, and Adsly carries it for them. Advertisers grow into large budgets from a working first account, not the other way round. Most of the Pro Panel base runs in TON currency; we publish those rows as market data.
What advertisers really spend: per month
Lifetime totals mix one-week tests with three-year accounts. Monthly spend is the fairer view. We rebuilt it from daily statistics (rows are cumulative, so each day’s spend is the difference from the day before), March to September 2026.
| Monthly spend per active account | Euro | TON currency |
|---|---|---|
| Account-months (accounts) | 220 (98) | 542 (233) |
| 75th percentile | €602 | 771 TON |
| 90th percentile | €1,623 | 1,866 TON |
| Monthly spend band | Euro account-months | TON account-months |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000–4,999 | 12.3% | 18.3% |
| 5,000–24,999 | 2.7% | 2.8% |
| 25,000 and more | 0.0% | 0.2% |
One Euro account-month in four went above €600, one in ten above €1,623, and 15% of them landed at €1,000 or more — that is where accounts go once the first ads prove themselves. The handful of Stars accounts is a different world — 18 account-months from 9 accounts with a median of 93,450 Stars, about $1,870 of ad credit at Telegram’s $0.02 per Star.
The first 30 days of a new account
What matters before you pay is what a first month looks like. We took every account whose very first ad ran between 1 March and 18 September 2026 and measured its first 30 days.
| First 30 days of a new account | Euro | TON currency |
|---|---|---|
| New accounts that spent | 71 | 135 |
| 75th percentile spend | €501 | 947 TON |
| 90th percentile spend | €861 | 2,361 TON |
| Median ads created | 217 | 264 |
| Median ads that spent money | 149 | 194 |
Euro: first ads 7 March – 11 September 2026; TON: 1 March – 15 September 2026.
The €500 ad balance in a regular-niche Euro account is not an arbitrary entry fee: it covers a full first month of real testing for three new accounts in four, and the most active tenth went past €861 in that first month. Plan the €500 as month one, not as the whole budget.
Why the minimum is an account question, not a campaign question
New advertisers often ask what budget to give “the campaign”. On Telegram that is the wrong unit. Targeting is fixed once an ad is created — Telegram’s guide says its “targeting parameters can’t be changed” — so advertisers create one ad per channel list, audience or text and end up with hundreds of small ones.
| Measured in Pro Panel | Euro | TON currency |
|---|---|---|
| Median lifetime spend per campaign | €0.50 | 0.16 TON |
| 90th percentile per campaign | €4.50 | 3.40 TON |
| Median impressions per campaign | 188 | 146 |
| Ads created per account per month, median | 172 | 43 |
| Spend on a day the account runs, median | €12.95 | 14.57 TON |
| Spend on a day the account runs, 90th percentile | €81.68 | 127.53 TON |
| CPM set on the ad, median | €2.03 | 0.70 TON |
Campaigns with spend: 120,441 Euro (112 accounts), 254,951 TON (266 accounts). Daily and monthly rows: March to October 2026.
Two more facts from the same base. Only 374 of 552,298 campaigns use a daily budget; everyone else gives each ad a lifetime budget and lets it run out. And 6.1% of TON campaigns with spend sit at the 0.1 floor CPM — our Gram guide shows how rarely a floor bid buys volume in a busy auction.
What €500 of ad balance buys, by destination
Arithmetic on measured Euro prices, not a forecast for your campaign. Impressions = €500 ÷ CPM × 1,000; clicks = €500 ÷ cost per click; results = €500 ÷ cost per subscriber or start. CPM uses every campaign with spend; click and result prices leave out campaigns with broken counters (clicks above impressions or CTR above 25%).
| Euro accounts, what the ad leads to | Campaigns (accounts) | CPM | Cost per click | Cost per result | €500 buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everything | 120,350 (112) | €2.94 | €0.339 | €2.60 per join or start | ~170,000 impressions, ~1,475 clicks |
| A channel | 37,885 (50) | €3.38 | €0.376 | €3.29 per subscriber | ~147,900 impressions, ~152 subscribers |
| A bot | 25,077 (48) | €2.32 | €0.206 | €0.52 per bot start | ~215,500 impressions, ~965 starts |
| A website (95% of these link outside Telegram) | 53,872 (44) | €2.55 | €0.354 | — | ~196,100 impressions, ~1,412 clicks |
| Crypto ads, any destination | 4,667 (36) | €3.26 | €0.510 | €3.24 per join or start | ~153,400 impressions, ~980 clicks |
Euro ads from 2 October 2023 to 19 October 2026, measured in Adsly Pro Panel.
A bot start is the cheapest result €500 buys; a subscriber is the most durable. Our channel vs bot guide breaks that down by niche.
What €5,000 and €25,000 buy in high-risk niches
Nutra, adult, binary options and gambling start higher — €5,000 of ad budget, or €25,000 for the official gambling account. Same arithmetic, same base, smaller samples; the campaign counts tell you how much weight each row carries.
| Euro accounts | Campaigns (accounts) | CPM | Cost per click | €5,000 buys | €25,000 buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binary options | 763 (17) | €3.23 | €0.512 | ~1.55M impressions, ~9,770 clicks | — |
| Nutra | 131 (10) | €2.96 | €0.464 | ~1.69M impressions, ~10,780 clicks | — |
| Adult and dating | 43 (2) | €1.89 | €0.241 | ~2.65M impressions, ~20,750 clicks | — |
| Gambling | 495 (30) | €2.37 | €0.148 | ~2.11M impressions, ~33,780 clicks | ~10.5M impressions, ~168,900 clicks |
At these levels the budget is no longer a test but a launch. That is why the €6,500 entry in nutra, adult and binary options includes a manager who sets up the campaigns and runs them to Active. Gambling has two formats of its own — see the official gambling launch guide.
How to plan a first test on €500
Our working method, not a measurement:
- One offer, three to five ad texts, two to four audiences or channel lists. That makes 10–20 ads — a fraction of the 217 a typical new Euro account creates in its first 30 days.
- Give each ad about 5,000 impressions before judging it. At the €2.94 Euro average CPM that is about €14.70 per ad; 20 ads cost about €294 and leave about €206 for the winners.
- Bid near the market, not the floor. The median CPM set on Euro ads in our base is €2.03. An ad that wins no auctions teaches you nothing.
- Plan two to three weeks. At the median €12.95 an account spends on an active day, €500 lasts about 39 active days; at the 75th percentile, €36.16 a day, about 14.
- Judge cost per subscriber or start, not CPM. A cheap thousand impressions that nobody taps is the most expensive result there is.
- Use lifetime budgets per ad, as 99.9% of the campaigns in our base do, and copy the winners with “Create a similar ad” instead of editing targeting.
For the step-by-step setup see how to create a Telegram ad campaign.
When a bigger budget makes sense
Add money when the data asks for it, not because a page says the platform is expensive.
- A winner holds for two weeks. One text-and-audience pair beats your target cost per subscriber or start for 14 days: copy it to new channel lists and countries before raising anything else.
- You run out of good placements. A Euro account is World — every available country, chosen per campaign — so the next €500 usually buys new countries and languages, not a higher bid.
- You are in a high-risk niche. €5,000 of budget is the entry there; in nutra, adult and binary options a managed launch is part of it.
- You are a gambling operator going official. The official gambling account starts from €25,000 of budget.
In our base the top tenth of Euro account-months spend €1,623 or more, and only 2.7% pass €5,000. Our scaling guide covers what changes past that point, and the managed service runs campaigns for you.
Self-serve, Stars or Euro: what each start gives you
- Self-serve on ads.telegram.org publishes no deposit floor, but every link must lead to a Telegram channel or bot — “Links to external sites are not allowed” — and when an ad is declined there is nobody to call.
- Stars are not a payment method for everyone: you spend Stars your own channel or bot earned, on ads for that channel or bot, at $0.02 of ad credit per Star.
- A Euro account through Adsly is the full platform: links to your own website and app, reach in Russia and Ukraine, a direct line to Telegram’s moderation for declined ads, and the official gambling account — opened even without a licence.
Every Euro account we open is World, opens in 48 hours, needs no KYC and is paid in any crypto. Adsly is the official Telegram Ads partner, and Pro Panel — the strongest panel for Telegram Ads, with bulk editing, automation rules and hourly analytics — comes free with the account. The order form prices your exact niche before you pay.
FAQ
Is there a €2 million minimum budget for Telegram Ads?
Not for advertisers. €2 million is the threshold for becoming a Telegram Ads reseller — buying directly from Telegram and reselling, as Adsly does as an official partner. An advertiser who opens through a partner starts much lower: with Adsly from €500 of ad balance (€650 in total) in regular niches, €5,000 in nutra, adult, binary options and the gambling test launch, and €25,000 for the official gambling account. The figure first became public with the ad cabinet Telegram showed at launch, reported by The Bell and vc.ru on 26 October 2021. Telegram’s current homepage, getting-started guide and Terms of Service mention no minimum deposit; the homepage says “Anyone can post ads on Telegram”.
What is the minimum budget for Telegram Ads in 2026?
Self-serve publishes no minimum deposit, only a minimum CPM of 0.1 TON (Gram). A Euro account through Adsly starts at €650 in regular niches, forex and crypto, with €500 on the ad balance; €6,500 for nutra, adult, binary options and the gambling test launch; from €31,250 for the official gambling account.
How long does €500 of Telegram Ads budget last?
In Adsly Pro Panel a Euro account spends a median €12.95 on a day it runs, so €500 lasts about 39 active days at that pace and about 14 at the 75th percentile (€36.16 a day).
Can I start Telegram Ads with €100?
Thirty percent of Euro account-months in our base spent under €100, so small monthly spend is normal. A regular-niche Euro account through Adsly still starts with €500 on the ad balance; you decide how fast to spend it, because every ad has its own budget.
What is the minimum CPM on Telegram Ads?
On self-serve, 0.1 TON (Gram), per Telegram’s getting-started guide. Telegram’s pages publish no euro floor today; until spring 2024 the same guide said €2. On Euro accounts in our base the median CPM set on an ad is €2.03 and the measured average is €2.94.
Why is the start higher for nutra, adult, binary options and gambling?
The entry is €5,000 of ad budget (€6,500 in total), or €25,000 for the official gambling account. In nutra, adult and binary options the price includes a manager who sets up your campaigns and runs them to Active. Measured Euro CPM in these niches runs from €1.89 to €3.23.
Can I pay for Telegram Ads with Stars?
Only if you own a channel or bot that earned Stars, and only for ads that promote that same channel or bot. Telegram values each Star at $0.02 of advertising credit.
Sources
- Telegram Ads: homepage — “Anyone can post ads on Telegram — using this platform”; “You can pay for your ad with Gram”.
- Telegram Ads: getting started — “The minimum CPM for a sponsored message is 0.1 Toncoin”; “Links to external sites are not allowed”; ads “without a budget”; targeting “can’t be changed”.
- Telegram Ad Platform Terms of Service — Maximum Budget per ad; Telegram may change “minimum CPM”; no minimum deposit.
- Telegram content creator terms, §4.3 — “each Star in your balance is worth 0.02 USD in advertising credit”.
- Telegram API: Stars, paying for ads — owners pay for ads “for channels/bots they own”.
- Pavel Durov, 28 February 2024 — the Ad Platform opens “to all advertisers”, ads sold in Toncoin.
- Pavel Durov, June 2026 — “TON’s native currency is becoming Gram”.
- Archived Telegram guide: 17 March 2022, 16 March 2024, 22 April 2024.
- The Bell, 26 October 2021 and vc.ru, 26 October 2021 — the original €2 million reports.
- Pages still repeating the figure: pwskills.com, eLama, kokoc.com.
- Adsly Pro Panel measurements, 19 October 2026: 551,607 campaigns, 442 accounts, 1,285,233,150 impressions.
Questions about your niche go to @adsly_pro; the price for your account is on /cabinet/.
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