A Telegram bot with 2 million users makes about $100,000 a year.
When Pat Walls tweeted those numbers, the replies piled on. Two million users and $8,000 a month? One comment called the math "scary".
I think the replies got it backwards. The founder behind it spent $0 to start, pays almost nothing in server costs, has zero employees, and the bot mostly runs itself while he builds other products in the same niche.
That is a Telegram bot business done right, and the full breakdown is in this Starter Story Build video, where Pat digs into AirTrackBot plus two other micro SaaS apps making $8,000 to $40,000 a month. Every number below comes from the video and the case studies behind it.
What AirTrackBot Actually Does
AirTrackBot lives inside Telegram. You message it, pick your departure city and destination, choose a date, and it comes back with the cheapest flights it can find. Tap one more button and it tracks the price, then pings you in Telegram the second the fare moves.
There is no app to download and no website that takes eight seconds to load on airport wifi. The whole product is a chat window.
In the video, Pat tests it live: Los Angeles to Tampa, one stop, $111. Then he turns on price tracking with a single tap. That whole flow took under a minute inside an app he already had open.
The founder is Mykola "Niki" Kravchuk, a solo developer from Kyiv. His origin story is painfully relatable: every Christmas he flew Kyiv to Budapest, the fares kept stinging him, and he was tired of refreshing airline sites waiting for a drop. He had a couple of failed startups behind him, saw the chatbot wave coming in 2017, and built the first version of AirTrackBot in about a month.
That side project now has over 2 million users doing roughly 1.5 million chats a month.
The Math Everyone Hated
Here is the part that triggered the comment section.
AirTrackBot charges $12 a year (yes, a year).
→ 2 million users
→ 1.5 million monthly chats
→ $7,000 to $8,000 a month, from subscriptions plus affiliate commissions on bookings
→ about $100,000 a year total
Per user, that revenue rounds to almost nothing. If a VC saw those numbers they'd close the tab. And if you judge every product by ARPU, you would too.
But look at the cost side. The bot was $0 to start (Starter Story scores it 90 out of 100 on their "easy to start" scale). It has one founder and zero employees. And because it runs on top of Telegram, there is no real infrastructure bill. A normal website serving 2 million users would eat thousands a month in servers and need someone on call. A bot rides on Telegram's platform instead.
Distribution worked the same way. Niki never bought those users with ads. The bot spread inside Telegram, went viral in Ukraine first, then crossed borders because flight prices hurt everywhere.
The other objection in the replies was "why use this instead of Google Flights?" Pat's answer stuck with me: why use Notion when a spreadsheet exists? Different people want different interfaces. Some travelers don't want to load a flight search engine on hotel wifi, they want to type a city name into the app they already use all day and get pinged when the fare drops. Two million people agree.
So the real picture is $100K a year of mostly passive income, near-zero costs, and a founder whose day-to-day attention is optional. I know founders doing $30K MRR who are more trapped than that.
One Niche, Three Products
The detail I'd actually steal is in Niki's bio, and Pat catches it immediately.
AirTrackBot is not his only product. He also runs manyflights.io, a web-based cheap flight finder, and AirTrack GPT, a ChatGPT version of the same idea.
Three products. One niche: cheap flights.
Compare that to the "12 startups in 12 months" crowd building an email tool in January and a flight tracker in February. Every month they start from zero, with new APIs to learn and a new audience to find.
Niki compounds instead. He already knows the flight data APIs, what converts, what travelers will pay. When a new platform shows up (Telegram in 2017, ChatGPT in 2023), he ships the same proven idea there in a fraction of the time, and every product can cross-sell the others.
Pick a space you can stand working in for years, then build lots of small things inside it. That is how a $7K a month bot quietly becomes a portfolio.
The Other Two Apps in the Video
Pat pulls two more examples from the Starter Story database, going up the revenue ladder.
Stagetimer.io, $8,300 a month. A remote-controlled countdown timer for live events, built by Lukas Hermann and his wife Liz. A presenter sees a full-screen timer, the producer controls it from another device. It charges about $16 a month per seat, and business customers renew because events going over time is a real cost. The part I love: Lukas validated it with one post in r/CommercialAV, a 28,000-member subreddit. The post got 57 upvotes and 34 comments, and that was enough to confirm a business now trusted by 19,000 video producers and event organizers. I went deeper on Stagetimer in my breakdown of simple apps that make money.
Parseur, $40,000 a month. AI data extraction from emails and documents, built by Sylvestre Dupont and Sylvain Josserand with zero employees at the time of the case study. Volume-based pricing: free for 20 pages a month, $69 a month for 300 pages, $299 a month for 10,000. At that top tier you only need a handful of customers for a serious business. Their launch flopped on both Hacker News and Product Hunt, and growth only started once they figured out their actual users were hanging out on Quora. I covered that playbook in how to grow an app with no audience.
Same database, three different pricing models: $12 a year consumer volume, per-seat B2B, usage-based B2B. Who pays, and how, matters as much as what you build.
The Playbook If You Want to Build One
Here is what I'd take from AirTrackBot if I were starting a Telegram bot business in 2026.
1. Build where the users already are. Telegram has around a billion users and your bot inherits their login, their notifications, and their habit. You skip the two hardest problems in consumer apps: install friction and re-engagement.
2. Solve a pain you personally pay for. Niki built a flight tracker because airfares to Budapest kept burning him every Christmas. He was the first user. You can smell the difference in products built that way.
3. Charge something, even if it's tiny. $12 a year sounds like a joke until 2 million users and affiliate commissions turn it into $100K. A small price also filters for people who actually want the thing.
4. Validate with one niche post, not a launch. Stagetimer needed 57 upvotes in the right subreddit, not a Product Hunt badge. Find the forum where your buyers already complain and ask them what features they'd need.
5. Stay in the niche after the first win. The second product in the same space costs you half the effort of the first. That is the lesson of manyflights.io and AirTrack GPT.
None of this needs a team or funding. In 2017 Niki needed to code the bot himself. In 2026, with Claude Code or Cursor, a working Telegram bot is a weekend project, and the Telegram Bot API is free.
FAQ
How much money does AirTrackBot make?
AirTrackBot makes $7,000 to $8,000 a month, roughly $100,000 a year, according to its Starter Story case study. Revenue comes from a $12 a year subscription plus affiliate commissions on flight bookings. The bot has over 2 million users, handles about 1.5 million chats a month, and is run by one founder with zero employees.
How does a Telegram bot business make money?
The common models are subscriptions (AirTrackBot charges $12 a year for premium features), affiliate commissions (it earns on flight bookings it refers), and pay-per-use credits. Because the bot runs on Telegram's infrastructure, server costs stay near zero, so even modest revenue can be mostly profit.
Is a Telegram bot still worth building in 2026?
Yes, if you pick a pain people check their phone for. Telegram is near a billion users and bots inherit its notifications, which beats email for things like price alerts. Building is also cheaper than it was for Niki Kravchuk in 2017: AI coding tools can get a working bot shipped in days, and the Bot API costs nothing.
Do you need to know how to code to build a Telegram bot?
Less than ever. No-code bot builders exist, and AI tools like Claude Code can write a working bot from a plain-English description. The Telegram Bot API is free and well documented. The harder parts are picking a real pain, finding a data source (flight prices, in AirTrackBot's case), and pricing it so the math works at your audience size.
I pull apart businesses like this every week on the podcast: bootstrapped founders, real revenue, and the exact decisions behind the numbers.
