Telegram bot guides

25 guides to the parts of Telegram bots that actually trip people up, tokens and permissions, why a bot goes silent in a group, webhooks against polling, rate limits, payments and attribution. Each one answers a specific question and says where the mistakes are.

Watch instead

All 50 videos

Short screen recordings of Botable itself, the product rather than the protocol. Each one plays on the video hub, with its transcript underneath.

Where to start

If you have never made a bot, read how to create a Telegram bot first, it explains the split between registering the bot, which takes thirty seconds, and giving it something to do, which is the part everyone means when they say building a bot is hard.

If your bot already exists and is misbehaving, two pages solve most cases. A bot that answers commands but ignores everything else in a group is privacy mode, which is a default rather than a fault, and the fix has a re-add step almost every explanation leaves out. A bot that has gone completely silent is covered by the troubleshooting guide, which works through the causes in order of how often they turn out to be the answer rather than in the order they occur to you.

And if you are about to put a bot in front of real users, the three worth reading before rather than after are rate limits, storing data and security. Each describes a mistake that is cheap to avoid up front and expensive to fix once people are depending on the thing.

Getting started

Building

Running it

Growing

Looking for something to build?

These guides cover how Telegram bots work. The build guides cover what to build, thirty-one bot types, each with its commands, its steps and a prompt you can paste in. If you are choosing between tools, the comparisons set out what each category can and cannot do.

Build a bot from a description