The spread of prices for a Telegram bot looks absurd: from five thousand on a freelance exchange to half a million at a studio. Both numbers are real, because the word "bot" covers four different products. Below are the brackets for each, in hours and in roubles at a rate of ₽1,250 an hour.
Bracket one: the notifier, ₽10,000–20,000
The bot receives an event and forwards it to a chat. A request came from the site, a message dropped to the manager. A server went down, a message dropped to the admin.
Eight to sixteen hours of work: connect the Bot API, parse the incoming webhook, put it on a server, set up restarts. There is almost no logic, no storage, no interface.
Such a bot really can be assembled in an evening, and the five-thousand offer on the exchange is about this one. The trouble starts when for five thousand people order something from the next three categories.
Bracket two: the questionnaire bot with an admin panel, ₽40,000–70,000
The bot asks questions, collects answers, and puts them in a database. The manager sees the requests in a web panel and changes statuses.
| Work | Hours |
|---|---|
| Dialogue scenario and states | 8 |
| Database and models | 6 |
| Bot logic, input-error handling | 14 |
| Admin panel with a list and filters | 12 |
| Authorisation in the admin panel | 4 |
| Deployment, logs, monitoring | 6 |
Fifty hours. The main line here is the dialogue states. A user will abandon the questionnaire on step three, come back two days later, and write "hi" instead of answering the question. A bot that does not survive this falls apart on the first hundred users.
Bracket three: the bot with payment and a personal account, ₽110,000–180,000
A catalogue, a basket, taking payments, order history, status notifications.
Money adds to the estimate less code than responsibility. The payment provider sends confirmation asynchronously, duplicates arrive regularly, the connection drops mid-transaction. Idempotency, retries, reconciliation are 20 to 30 hours on top of the integration itself, and they do not shrink.
Plus refunds, plus receipts under 54-FZ, plus consents to data processing if you collect a phone number.
Bracket four: the Mini App, ₽250,000–450,000
A full web application inside Telegram: its own interface, its own screens, authorisation via Telegram, integration with a CRM or a warehouse.
In volume this is an ordinary front-end project plus a server side. Two to three hundred hours, and they break down as in any web development: design work, design, markup, API, integrations, tests.
What pushes the estimate up
Integrations. Every external system adds 15 to 40 hours. A documented API like YooKassa or Bitrix24 is closer to the lower bound. A home-grown CRM with no documentation is closer to the upper, sometimes beyond it.
Load. A bot for a hundred users and a bot for a hundred thousand are different architectures. The second needs queues, because Telegram limits the send rate, and on a mass mailing the bot hits the limit and starts losing messages.
Moderation and roles. Three access levels in the admin panel are a separate subsystem. A checkbox will not cover it.
Multilingual support. Plus 15 to 20% to the text part.
What is not in the estimate and still costs money
- Hosting. From ₽500 a month for a notifier to ₽5,000–15,000 for a Mini App with a database.
- Payment provider. A commission of 2.5 to 3.5% of turnover.
- Support. Telegram changes the Bot API several times a year. A bot with no maintenance lives until the first breaking change.
- Content. Message texts, images, product descriptions.
Why five thousand ends in a redo
The difference between a ₽5,000 bot and a ₽50,000 one is rarely visible in the features the client uses. It shows up on a failure.
A cheap bot crashes and stays silent. It has no logs, no restart, no handling of invalid input, no separation of environments. It works right up to the first unexpected user action, after which you learn of the breakage from a client who gave up waiting for a reply.
Rebuilding such a bot costs more than writing one from scratch: someone else's code with no tests and no documentation has to be read first.
How to check the estimate before you pay
Four questions for the contractor:
- What happens if the user taps the button twice?
- Where will the data be stored and who has access to it?
- Who owns the source code after handover?
- What does support include and how much does it cost per month?
The answers to these diverge between contractors far more than the prices do.