Telegram Stars Fee Arithmetic: What Actually Reaches Your Bank

Telegram Stars Fee Arithmetic: What Actually Reaches Your Bank

Search for Telegram Stars fees and you will find two confident, incompatible answers.

One says creators keep 100% — Telegram takes no commission, every Star a fan sends lands in your balance intact.

The other says creators lose about 32% of every mobile payment.

Neither is wrong. They are measuring different things, and nobody explains the gap between them. This article does the arithmetic.

The short answer

Telegram does not take a commission from creators. It genuinely doesn't. When a fan sends you 1,000 Stars, your balance shows 1,000 Stars.

But a Star is not a fixed amount of money. It costs one price when your customer buys it and is worth a different, lower price when you cash it out. The loss is not deducted from you — it happened before the Star ever reached you, in the conversion from your customer's dollars into Stars.

You keep 100% of a unit that already lost value on its way to becoming that unit.

The two prices of one Star

There are two exchange rates, and they are not the same number.

What your customer pays per Star depends entirely on where and how they topped up:

What you receive per Star does not depend on any of that. It is approximately $0.0133, paid in TON through Fragment.

One number moves. The other doesn't. Everything else in this article follows from that.

Worked example: a $20 product

Say you price a digital product at 1,000 Stars. Three customers buy it. All three send you exactly 1,000 Stars. Your balance goes up by 1,000 Stars three times.

Customer A tops up 100 Stars at a time on their iPhone, ten times. They paid $19.90. You receive $13.30. Gap: $6.60 — 33.2%.

Customer B buys the 1,000-Star bundle in-app. They paid $14.99. You receive $13.30. Gap: $1.69 — 11.3%.

Customer C tops up 10,000 Stars in-app once, and this purchase spends a tenth of it. They effectively paid $13.50. You receive $13.30. Gap: $0.20 — 1.5%.

Same product. Same price. Same Stars received. The money that evaporated between your customer's card and your payout ranges from 1.5% to 33.2% — and you had no visibility into which happened.

This is the single most important fact about Stars economics, and it is the one nobody states: the "32% loss" is not a fee rate. It is the worst case, and it applies to small in-app top-ups only.

Where the money actually goes

For a customer topping up in small amounts on a phone, the gap breaks down roughly like this:

Apple or Google take ~30%. This is the dominant cost by an order of magnitude. It is taken at the moment your customer buys Stars, before Telegram receives anything. Telegram cannot waive it — App Store and Play Store rules require in-app digital purchases to go through their billing, and that billing carries the platform commission.

The Fragment conversion spread takes ~2–3%. Your Stars are cashed out to TON on Fragment. Sources describe this as a market spread rather than an explicit fee, and report it widening to 5–8% in volatile periods. Telegram publishes no official figure.

Converting TON to fiat costs ~0.5–1%. Whatever exchange you use to turn TON into spendable currency takes its own cut, plus network fees.

Telegram takes nothing. Which is why the "100%" claim is technically accurate and practically misleading.

Why bulk top-ups are cheaper — and what it means for you

Look again at the in-app table. The per-Star price falls from $0.0199 at the 100-Star bundle to $0.0135 at the 10,000-Star bundle. Apple's 30% is still being taken; Telegram simply prices the larger bundles closer to cost.

The consequence for you is unintuitive: a customer who tops up in bulk is a dramatically better customer than one who tops up per purchase, even though you receive identical Stars from both. Not because you earn more — you don't — but because your product costs them 33% less in real money, which makes them far more likely to buy again.

You cannot force a top-up size. You can influence it:

• Price products so a natural bundle covers several purchases rather than falling just above one
• Avoid prices like 110 or 520 Stars that push a customer into a second small top-up
• If you sell repeat purchases or subscriptions, say plainly that larger top-ups cost less per Star

That last point costs you nothing and saves your customers real money. It is also, as far as we can tell, absent from every competing guide.

Two rules that gate every withdrawal

Before any of this becomes money you can spend:

A 21-day hold. Each Star is locked for 21 days from the day you received it. Not 21 days from your first sale — 21 days per Star, individually. A steady revenue stream is therefore permanently three weeks behind itself.

A 1,000-Star minimum, roughly $13. Below that you cannot withdraw at all.

Together these mean a creator earning 300 Stars a month waits over three months for a first payout. Plan working capital accordingly.

What Telegram officially documents, and what it doesn't

Worth knowing which of the above is authoritative.

Telegram's Bot Payments documentation does state, unambiguously, that payments for digital goods and services must be carried out exclusively in Telegram Stars. It documents the refund method and the mandatory /paysupport command. It confirms developers receive "net proceeds" after VAT and fees.

It does not publish the withdrawal rate, the Fragment spread, the hold period, or the minimum. Every figure in this article for those items comes from third-party reporting and creator experience, and third-party sources disagree at the margins — $0.013 versus $0.0133, "5% Fragment fee" versus "2–3% spread" versus "near-zero."

Treat the rates here as a September 2026 snapshot, not a constant.

How to check your own real number

Because the rates move, the durable skill is measuring your own rather than trusting anyone's table, including this one.

1. Note your Stars balance and the date.
2. When you withdraw, record the exact TON received and the TON/USD rate at that moment.
3. Divide the resulting USD by the Stars withdrawn. That is your real per-Star rate, spread included.
4. For the other half, ask a handful of customers what they paid for their last top-up. That gives you the buyer-side rate you cannot otherwise see.

The difference between those two numbers is your true cost of using Stars. It is the only figure that matters, and it is specific to your customers.

What this means in practice

Stars are not expensive because Telegram is greedy. Telegram's cut is zero. The expense is Apple's and Google's, and it is unavoidable for digital goods sold inside a mobile app — by their rules, not Telegram's.

Your effective take rate is set by customer behaviour, not by your pricing. The same product yields the same Stars regardless, but costs your customer between 1.5% and 33% more than you receive.

The worst case is the common case. Most casual buyers top up small amounts on a phone, which is exactly the 33% scenario. Assume that as your baseline until you have data saying otherwise.

Budget for the 21-day lag. It is the constraint that surprises people, not the fees.

Figures current as of September 2026. Bundle prices vary by region and store, and Telegram does not publish the withdrawal rate officially — verify against your own payout before making decisions that depend on the exact number.