I made $700 in Telegram Stars and cashed it out. Here is exactly how the payout works
Every time someone asks how Telegram Stars payouts work, the answers are
"apparently" and "I have not tried it, their star system confuses me". I have
tried it. Six months on a private channel, about $1,200 in Stars, $700 of that in
the first month, and I have taken the money out to both a bank account and a
crypto ATM.
Here is what actually happens, including the parts that caught me out.
The first thing that surprised me is that there is no wallet. I assumed the Stars
land in one balance on my account. They do not. They collect on whatever you sold
from. Sell from a channel and the balance sits on that channel. Sell through a bot
and it sits on that bot. They do not add up together.
This matters because you need 1,000 Stars on a balance before Telegram will let
you withdraw at all. I had Stars sitting in two places once and could not touch
either. So pick one place and sell from there.
The second thing is the waiting, and this is the part everyone gets half right.
Each sale has its own clock, around three weeks from the day that sale happened.
Sell 300 Stars today and those 300 unlock about three weeks from today. Sell 500
tomorrow and those 500 start their own count. There is no single timer for the
whole balance.
In practice it only hurts you once. The first month it feels broken because
nothing is available. After that, if you sell regularly, there is always
something mature sitting there, so I stopped thinking about it and just withdrew
once a month.
Now the withdrawal itself.
You need Wallet turned on and you need two factor authentication on your account.
The first time I tried, it refused me because my 2FA password was too new. You
have to wait a day after setting it up. That error made no sense to me at the
time so I am putting it here.
From the channel balance you press withdraw and it sends you over to Fragment.
That is where the money actually leaves Telegram. Fragment asked me for identity
verification once, an ID document and a photo of my face, and after that it never
asked again.
Then it pays out in the TON chain coin, which they now call Gram. That is the only
place it goes. Telegram does not send you money, it sends you crypto, and
everything after that is on you.
One thing from my own experience that I have not seen written anywhere. I could
only submit a withdrawal request about once every 40 minutes to an hour. I got the
amount wrong once and then sat there waiting to fix it. So put the right number in
the first time.
What I ended up with was around $13 for every thousand Stars. I never found a fee
line anywhere in Telegram, no "our commission is X" row, nothing. All I can tell
you is what landed in my wallet at the end.
Then comes the annoying part, which is turning Gram into money you can actually
spend.
I did it two ways. Inside Telegram Wallet you can connect a bank and take it out
as normal money. Or, if you are in Europe, there are crypto ATMs where you send
the coins and take cash out. The ATM did not ask me for anything, but the fee was
high, and there is a daily cap. The bank route was not really better once I
counted everything.
That step is the worst part of the whole system and I never solved it properly.
Last thing, because it is what people usually want to know. My channel was private
and it was adult content. I never marked it as anything special. I never got a
warning, never got restricted, and every withdrawal went through. Six months, no
problems. I am not promising you the same, I am telling you what happened to me.
So that is the whole thing. Money collects per channel, you need 1,000 Stars
before you can move it, each sale waits about three weeks, one identity check at
Fragment, and crypto at the other end.
The bit I still have not figured out is the last mile. Getting from Gram to money
in a bank account cost me more than it should. If you are doing this, what route
are you using and what does it actually cost you?