Day 5 of building one commercial API every day for 60 days.
Today's is the one I'm most surprised nobody has nailed: reading public Telegram channels as clean JSON.
The gap
Telegram has roughly a billion monthly users. Huge crypto communities, news channels, OSINT sources, brands — all posting in public channels anyone can read in a browser.
But there's no official API to read a channel you don't own. The Bot API only sees chats your bot is in. MTProto means spinning up a full client session, phone-number auth, and a library most people don't want in their stack. If you just want "give me @durov's latest posts as JSON," you're out of luck.
The insight
Telegram already publishes every public channel as a plain web page: t.me/s/. Open https://t.me/s/durov logged-out and you'll see the profile, subscriber count, and recent posts with view counts and reactions — served to any anonymous visitor, no account required.
That's the whole product. Fetch that page, parse it, return structured JSON. No MTProto, no bot token, no login, nothing private.
What it does
Three endpoints:
- GET /v1/channel/{username} — profile: title, description, verified flag, photo, subscriber count, and photo/video/link counters.
- GET /v1/channel/{username}/posts — recent posts, newest first: text, view counts, reaction totals, media URLs, link previews, forward info. With ?limit= (1–100), ?before= cursor pagination, and ?q= keyword filtering.
- GET /v1/channel/{username}/posts/{id} — a single post.
Known-good channels to try: durov, telegram, toncoin, cointelegraph, bloomberg, whale_alert (pass the handle without the @). A 404 just means that username isn't a public channel — not an error.
The API also parses "11.8M subscribers" into the integer 11800000 for you, keeping the original text alongside it. Small thing, but it's the difference between "data" and "a string you now have to clean."
Things that were fiddlier than expected
Pagination. t.me/s/ serves oldest-last and pages backward with a ?before= cursor. To answer ?limit=45 I walk up to 5 pages, normalize everything newest-first, dedupe on post id, and hand back a next_before cursor so callers can keep going.
Reactions. Telegram renders reaction emoji as little sprite images, not characters. Counts are reliable ("65.7K" → 65700); the exact emoji identity is best-effort. I'd rather ship honest "count is solid, emoji may be blank" than fake precision.
Boring by design
It's a Supabase Edge Function (Deno), zero dependencies, stateless — nothing stored, nothing logged. A short in-memory cache smooths out repeat calls. Fail-closed auth. Cold path answers in ~100ms; a real channel fetch is sub-second; a deep 5-page walk is ~1.7s.
On the legal side
Public, logged-out data only — the same bytes t.me shows any anonymous browser. No private channels, no groups, no user accounts, no credentials. That's the defensible posture US courts have carved out for scraping public pages (the logged-out distinction from Meta v. Bright Data). Callers are still responsible for privacy law (GDPR etc.) when they store results.
Who it's for
Crypto/trading communities monitoring channels, OSINT and threat-intel teams, marketing folks vetting influencers or watching competitors, news aggregators, and anyone building Telegram content feeds without touching MTProto.
That's Day 5. Free tier to try it, cheap paid tiers if it's useful. Following the "60 APIs in 60 Days" series — one commercial API, every day. Day 6 tomorrow. 👋
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