The advertised price of a Telegram forwarding tool and the price you end up paying are often different numbers. Not because anyone is lying, but because the three things most people need — instant delivery, private sources and AI that doesn't run out — are frequently sold separately from the headline tier.
Here's what the market actually costs in July 2026.
| Tool | Cheapest paid | What that tier actually gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Junction bot | €3/mo (Economy) | Public sources only, up to 1 hour delivery delay, 30 AI generations |
| Junction bot | €12/mo (Direct) | Any source type, instant, 60 AI generations |
| Junction bot | €18/mo (Expert) | Unlimited rules, instant, 90 AI generations |
| EzForwardBot | £0 (Free) | 4 connections, instant, private + protected sources, no AI |
| EzForwardBot | £9.99/mo (Pro) | 25 connections, unmetered AI, backfill, webhooks |
| TeleFeed | Free / unpublished premium | Free forwarding; premium pricing not listed |
| tgcf | £0 + server | Everything, if you run it yourself (~£4–6/mo VPS) |
This surprises people. Junction's €3 Economy plan can take up to an hour to deliver a post. For a news mirror that's fine. For trading signals it's worthless — an hour-old signal is history.
Instant delivery starts at €12/mo there. It's included on every EzForwardBot plan including free, and it's included in self-hosted tools since you control the loop.
If timing matters to you, ignore any tier that doesn't say "instant".
The most useful sources are usually the ones you can't forward from — private channels, or channels with "restrict saving content" enabled. Reading those requires a logged-in user account rather than a bot, which costs the provider more, so it tends to sit behind a higher tier.
Junction gates it at Direct (€12/mo). We don't gate it at all — it works on the free plan, because it's the main reason people show up.
This is the one that quietly breaks budgets. Junction includes 30–90 AI "generations" per month depending on tier. If you translate every post in a channel that publishes 40 times a day, that's 1,200 translations a month. Ninety doesn't cover it, so either you stop translating or you pay for more.
Metering is fine for occasional use and terrible for the case where AI is doing real work. Our paid plans don't meter it — that's a deliberate positioning choice, and it's the thing most of our switchers mention.
Genuinely worth comparing, since the software is free:
Self-hosting wins on privacy — your session file never leaves your machine — and on cost if your time is cheap. It loses if you'd rather the 1am problem be someone else's.
Three questions:
Worked examples:
For simple public mirroring where a delay is acceptable, €3/mo at Junction is the cheapest real option and we don't have an answer to it.
For everything else — instant, private sources, AI doing actual work — the market sits at £10–18/mo, and that's the band we priced into deliberately at £9.99 with nothing metered. See the full comparison, or our pricing.
Prices read from each tool's own site on 27 July 2026; EUR converted at that day's ECB rate (0.85524). If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.