Telegram builds its first serverless bot backend — one-command deploy, invite-only for now

Telegram has moved bot and Mini App backends onto its own serverless infrastructure for the first time. Developers upload JavaScript ES modules with npx tgcloud push. Each invocation runs in a V8 isolate close to the Bot API, removing the need to maintain a server, Docker containers, or scaling infrastructure.

This is not Node.js hosting. The cloud runtime does not support node_modules, npm runtime dependencies, a filesystem, relative imports, or Node Buffer; only the local CLI requires Node.js 18 or newer. Each bot receives one persistent SQLite-backed database. Schema changes use npx tgcloud migrate, and foreign keys are unsupported.

External HTTP requests are available only through fetch in Telegram's sdk. Responses must be textual and are capped at 32 MB. Existing Telegram file_id values can be reused, but handlers cannot yet download file bytes or upload new files. Telegram has not published CPU, memory, execution-time, database-size, or invocation-rate quotas.

The service remains an invite-only closed test. Telegram Info and Kod.ru reported that initial access went to former Telegram contest participants, who must enable Serverless through @BotFather and obtain a separate CLI token. Pricing, a free tier, SLA, GA date, multi-tenant security architecture, and vulnerability-handling boundaries have not been announced; @tgcloud/cli remains at version 0.1.2 on npm.

via Kod.ru / Telegram Docs / Telegram Info