Developer Outlines Free-Tier Telegram Bot Store for Selling Digital Goods via Crypto

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A DEV Community article describes how to build an automated store for digital products using a Telegram bot instead of a traditional e-commerce platform. The approach avoids payment processors like Stripe or PayPal, relying instead on peer-to-peer cryptocurrency deposits, with the author claiming this eliminates chargeback risk and platform fees. The bot is intended to run on free-tier cloud services such as Render or Railway, with hosting estimated at about $5 per month. The article includes a sample Express.js backend that uses the Telegram Bot API to handle purchase requests and checks transaction hashes before delivering download links.

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