How to download a public Telegram channel's posts to CSV with Python (no API key, no phone number)

AI-assistance note: this article and the example code were written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic). The code was run and the numbers below come from a real run on 26 Oct 2026. I also built the Actor used here, so I am not a neutral reviewer of it.

Telegram's official API needs an account, a phone number and an app registration. For public channels there is an easier door: Telegram publishes a web preview of every public channel at t.me/s/<channel>. It shows the latest posts with text, date, views and reactions, 20 posts per page.

You can read that page yourself, but a real job needs more than one request: paging backwards, retries when Telegram answers 429, parsing the markup, turning 5.84M into a number, telling a forwarded post from an original one. Here is the short route.

What you need

• A free Apify account. The free plan includes $5 of platform credit per month, and Apify's pricing page says paid Store Actors draw on the same credits.
• The Telegram Channel Posts Scraper Actor. I built it. It costs $1 per 1,000 results (a post or a channel summary row each count as one), with no start fee. By my arithmetic the free credit covers about 5,000 posts a month.
• Python 3.11+ (required by the current apify-client) and two small scripts from this repo (MIT).

Download the posts

pip install -r requirements.txt
export APIFY_TOKEN=...        # Apify Console -> Settings -> API & integrations
python fetch_posts.py durov telegram --max 60

You get posts.csv with channel, post link, date (UTC), views, reactions, media types, hashtags and text. Filters help for real work: --since "30 days" and --keywords price launch keep only recent posts that mention your words.

What the data showed

I ran it on two official channels, 60 posts each (26 Oct 2026):

A few things a report like this makes easy to see:

• When they post. Most posts of the durov channel went out at 15:00 UTC (10 of 60), then 14:00 and 17:00 (7 each). The telegram channel clusters at 16:00–17:00 UTC (30 of 60).
• What got the most views. The three biggest durov posts were a contest announcement, a formatting update and a policy post, with 24.4M, 23.2M and 19.0M views.
• Media vs text. Text-only durov posts averaged 7.35M views, photo posts 4.81M. That is 33 versus 9 posts, so treat it as a hint, not a rule.

python channel_report.py posts.csv

prints this kind of summary for any CSV you make.

Limits to know about

• Only channels whose public web preview is switched on can be read. Private channels, groups, users and bots cannot.
• Telegram rounds big numbers on that page, so views and subscribers above a few thousand are approximate.
• Media links are temporary, so download files soon after the run.
• There is no search across all of Telegram. You give the channels, the keyword filter works inside each one.
• Be careful with personal data. Follow Telegram's terms and the privacy laws that apply to you.

Try it, tell me what breaks

If a channel returns nothing or a field looks wrong, open an issue on the repo or on the Actor page with the channel name and what you expected. I read them.

Not affiliated with Telegram.