Developer builds unofficial Telegram public channel read API in one day

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A developer building one commercial API per day for 60 days has released an unofficial API that reads public Telegram channels and returns structured JSON data. Telegram, which has roughly one billion monthly users, offers no official API for reading public channels you do not own, making access cumbersome for developers. The tool works by fetching and parsing the publicly accessible web pages Telegram already serves at t.me/s/ to any anonymous visitor, requiring no bot token, phone authentication, or MTProto client. It exposes three endpoints covering channel profiles, recent posts with view counts and reactions, and individual post lookups, with support for pagination, keyword filtering, and parsed subscriber counts. The API is built as a stateless Supabase Edge Function with no data storage, and the developer positions it as legally defensible since it only accesses the same logged-out public data available to any browser.

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