Why Mobile Stars Cost Your Customers 30% More Than Desktop

Why Mobile Stars Cost Your Customers 30% More Than Desktop

Your customer buys 1,000 Stars. Depending on where they tapped, they paid somewhere between $13.50 and $19.90 for the identical thing.

You receive the same amount either way — roughly $13.30.

That spread is the largest controllable variable in Telegram commerce, and almost nobody selling on the platform knows it exists.

Where the 30% comes from

Every in-app purchase on iOS and Android goes through Apple's or Google's billing system, and each takes approximately 30% of the transaction. This applies to Telegram exactly as it applies to every other app.

So when your customer buys Stars inside the Telegram mobile app, roughly thirty cents of every dollar never reaches Telegram at all. Telegram prices the bundles to absorb this, which is why the same Stars cost more on a phone than anywhere else.

Buy through Fragment — Telegram's official partner platform, accessed via desktop or browser with a crypto wallet — and there is no app store in the transaction. No 30% commission. The Stars are identical; only the toll booth is missing.

The actual price table

Two things jump out.

Small in-app bundles are the worst possible way to buy Stars. At $0.0199 per Star for a 100-Star top-up, a third of your customer's money is gone before it reaches you.

Large in-app bundles are nearly as good as Fragment. At the 10,000-Star tier, in-app pricing drops to $0.0135 — a rounding error away from what you receive. Telegram is clearly absorbing the app store cut at volume.

The gap is not really "mobile versus desktop." It is small purchases versus large ones, and small purchases happen to be what mobile encourages.

What this costs you, concretely

Take a 500-Star product — call it $10.

A customer who tops up 500 Stars in-app pays $9.99. You receive $6.65. A third of what they spent vanished.

The same customer, having previously topped up 10,000 Stars in one go, spends the same 500 Stars. Their real cost was $6.75. You still receive $6.65. Almost nothing was lost.

Identical sale. Identical revenue to you. The customer paid 48% more in the first case — and customers who feel a product was expensive buy less often, which is how a fee you don't pay becomes a revenue problem you do have.

What you are allowed to say about it

Here the ground gets careful, and most articles skip it.

App store rules have historically restricted how apps steer users toward cheaper external payment options — "anti-steering" provisions. Those rules have been the subject of sustained regulatory and legal pressure in multiple jurisdictions, and what is permitted has shifted more than once and continues to differ by region.

The practical position for a bot operator:

Safe. Explaining, outside the app, how Stars pricing works. Your website, your blog, your newsletter, your channel description. Pricing your products so that natural bundles cover them. Telling customers that larger top-ups cost less per Star as a factual statement about Telegram's pricing.

Risky. Building a flow inside your bot whose purpose is to route users away from in-app purchase for digital goods. That is the behaviour app store rules exist to prevent, whatever the current state of the regulation.

Prohibited. Selling digital goods in-app through any mechanism other than Stars.

If you want to be genuinely useful to customers without going anywhere near the line, put the explanation on your website and link to it from a channel post. You are then publishing accurate information about a third party's pricing, outside the app, which is ordinary commercial speech.

Pricing that works with the bundles

Since bundle boundaries determine your customer's real cost, price against them.

Price at or just under a bundle. A 450-Star product is comfortably covered by a 500-Star top-up. A 520-Star product forces a second top-up, and the second one is usually another small, expensive bundle.

Design repeat purchases around the 1,000-Star tier. It is the first genuinely reasonable in-app price point ($0.0150/Star versus $0.0199 for small bundles). Products at 200–300 Stars mean three or four purchases fit in one 1,000-Star top-up.

Make subscriptions annual where you can. One larger top-up beats twelve small ones for the customer's wallet, and the retention maths favours you too.

Never price just above a boundary. 1,050 Stars is the worst number on the board: it forces a second purchase for fifty Stars' worth of value.

The honest summary

You cannot change the 30%. It is Apple's and Google's, it is charged to your customer rather than to you, and it applies to every app on those platforms.

What you can change is how many separate top-ups your pricing forces. A catalogue priced so customers top up rarely and in bulk costs those customers meaningfully less for exactly the same revenue to you — and there is no downside to it whatsoever.

That is the whole opportunity, and it is free.

Prices are September 2026 figures and vary by region, currency and store. Telegram does not officially publish the withdrawal rate. App store payment rules are actively contested in several jurisdictions — verify current requirements before designing any flow that touches them.