Telegram Gifts: Gifts for Stars

Telegram Gifts in short

Everything else follows from that fork.

A regular gift is bought for the occasion, a collectible for the serial number, the rarity and the secondary market. The first costs about as much as a coffee and loses its value the second it is handed over. The second can be worth more than face value a month later and less than that half a year on.

🎁 What Telegram Gifts are

A Telegram gift is a digital item bought with Stars that stays on the recipient's account. The showcase opens straight from the other person's profile, payment comes off the Stars balance, and the gift lands in a separate section on their side immediately. No address, no shipping, no tracking number: everything happens inside the messenger within seconds. Telegram launched the mechanic at the end of 2024 and described it in the gifts announcement on its blog, then added fixed supplies and blockchain withdrawal later.

One thing separates a gift from a sticker: it belongs to the recipient, not to the sender.

That is where the rest of the meaning comes from. Once an item has an owner, it also has a price, a history of ownership and a way to change hands.

• Congratulate — a birthday, a holiday or nothing in particular: the button sits in the profile, no occasion required.
• Decorate a profile — received gifts stack into a showcase that every visitor of the account sees.
• Build a collection — limited editions run out, and after that they are only available second-hand.
• Speculate — rare copies resell above face value, but that is a gamble, not a savings plan.

Stars are the only means of payment here. A gift in the app cannot be paid for with rubles, a card or a coin: Stars go onto the balance first, then they move to the gift showcase. Telegram describes Stars themselves in the Stars documentation as an internal currency for digital purchases. So the question of what a gift costs always splits in two: what it costs in Stars, and what the Stars themselves cost you.

How much Telegram gifts cost

The price of a gift comes from its face value in Stars and its supply. The plainest ones start at 15 ⭐, while expensive limited editions reach 25,000 ⭐ and beyond.

Ruble figures follow the gift catalogue in the bot: 15 ⭐ = 21₽, 100 ⭐ = 140 ₽. Rates move, and the final sum is shown on the payment screen before anything is charged.

Supply moves the price harder than face value does. Mass limited editions are printed in tens of thousands of pieces and sit in the showcase for weeks. Exclusive ones come in thousands, the rarest in a few thousand, and those get taken within hours. Once the supply is gone, the edition leaves the showcase and is only available second-hand — at secondary-market prices rather than face value. The spread there is measured in multiples: the same edition with different traits goes both below face value and several times above it.

Some editions do not show up in the app at all — those are bought through a bot.

That is how buying gifts that are gone from Telegram works: the bot catalogue keeps withdrawn positions too, and the price there follows the same face value in Stars. The full service lives on the Telegram gifts page.

Gift types: regular, limited, collectible

There are three types, and they differ not in the artwork but in what the owner may do with them. The type decides whether a gift can be returned, sold and taken out of the messenger.

Regular gifts are the standing showcase range with no supply limit. They are always available, start at 15 ⭐ and serve exactly one purpose: making someone's day. They carry no collectible value, never reach the marketplace, and the only operation available is a swap back into Stars during the first days after receipt.

Limited gifts are printed in a fixed supply — 10,000 or 50,000 pieces, say. Prices start at 99 ⭐, every copy carries a serial number, and these are the editions that run out. While the supply lasts, the gift is bought like any showcase item. After that, only the secondary market is left. The gap between those two states is the whole point for collectors.

Collectible (upgraded) gifts come out of limited ones after an upgrade. The upgrade hands the gift a random set of traits: model, pattern and backdrop. Combinations land with different frequency — plain ones cover most of the supply, rare ones go to a handful of owners. From there a collectible is either listed on the Telegram marketplace for Stars or withdrawn as an NFT.

There is no way back: an upgrade is final.

Trait rarity is the main multiplier on price. Then come a low serial number, the size of the supply and how popular the theme is: editions tied to loud names hold their price longer than the rest, because there are always more buyers than copies.

Telling a limited edition apart from a regular one in the showcase is easy: Telegram shows the remaining supply next to the price. While the counter is above zero, the gift is bought as an ordinary item — at face value, with no rarity markup. The moment the supply ends, the position leaves the showcase and the market sets the price instead. That is where a plain purchase turns into a deal with a collector.

How to send a gift in Telegram — 5 steps

Sending takes under a minute and needs neither an address nor the recipient's consent. The order of actions is the same on a phone and in the desktop app.

There is a route in the opposite direction too — from the gift to the person. If you have not decided who gets it yet, open the showcase yourself and pick the recipient at the end. That makes it easier to compare editions without hopping between profiles.

1. Open Settings → Telegram Stars.
2. Go to the Gifts section.
3. Pick a gift from the showcase.
4. Tap Send and choose the recipient from your contacts.

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What to do with a gift you got

A received gift lands in the Gifts section of your profile and is visible to every visitor by default. That is also where it is managed: shown, hidden, swapped into Stars or sent for an upgrade. None of that needs the giver's approval. Declining a gift in advance is not possible — it arrives unannounced.

• Show on the profile — the default state, every visitor of the account sees the gift.
• Hide — the gift leaves the showcase and stays in the collection.
• Swap into Stars — available to regular gifts only, and only in the first days.
• Upgrade — turns a limited edition into a collectible copy.

The swap into Stars is the most common operation and the most frustrating one. Less comes back than the gift cost, and the window is short.

Hiding is simpler and safer. A hidden gift is not deleted, does not lose its number and does not go back to the giver — it simply stops showing in the profile showcase. The same toggle brings it back whenever you want. That helps when there are many gifts and you would rather display two or three favourites, since the profile showcase works like a shelf rather than a warehouse.

💰 How to sell a gift and swap it for Stars

Selling a gift and swapping a gift for Stars are two different operations, and confusing them costs money. A regular gift cannot be sold at all: the only route for it is the swap into Stars during the first week. Only an upgraded gift is sold.

The sale runs through the built-in marketplace: open the gift on your profile, tap Sell and set a price in Stars. The gift appears in the listings marked as for sale, and once someone buys it, the Stars land on your balance.

The difference between those rows is a choice between convenience and proceeds. The Telegram marketplace asks nothing extra: the sale happens inside the messenger and the money arrives as Stars on the same balance you spend from. Third-party venues charge a fraction of that but pay in TON, which means a crypto wallet and a plan for the coin afterwards. On small sums the saving on commission does not cover the hassle with a wallet.

You set the price yourself, and that is a skill of its own: price it high and the gift will hang around for months, price it low and it goes in a minute with nothing left over. The reference point is simple — check what copies of the same edition with similar traits are going for. Commission is taken off the final sum, so proceeds should be counted net of the venue's cut from the start.

Stars from a sale, incidentally, can also be sold for money.

Upgrades and NFT withdrawal for TON

A gift cannot be moved to the blockchain directly — the upgrade comes first. It costs from 25 ⭐ and turns a limited edition into a collectible copy with random traits and a serial number. Only then does the withdrawal button appear. Combining several gifts to chase a rarer variant is what Telegram calls crafting.

After that the gift moves to a TON wallet and becomes an ordinary NFT. Selling it happens on Fragment, the official Telegram venue, or on Getgems, the largest NFT market in the TON network.

The price of an NFT gift adds up from several parts, and face value in Stars is not the leading one. Trait rarity works hardest: a copy with a rare combination of model, pattern and backdrop is worth several times an ordinary one from the same supply. Next comes the serial number — the first few hundred are valued above the rest. Supply size and the popularity of the theme close the list: the smaller the edition and the louder the occasion, the longer the price holds.

Nobody here guarantees growth.

The secondary market for gifts is young and thin: some editions resell for multiples of face value, others go unclaimed a month later even at cost. Collectible gifts deserve to be treated as collecting, not as a deposit.

⭐ Where to get Stars and how to gift Premium

Every gift comes down to Stars on the balance. Inside the app they are bought through the App Store or Google Play, where the store keeps its cut — a star ends up costing roughly 2.1 ₽. Buying for rubles directly works out noticeably cheaper.

On a thousand Stars the gap reaches 810 ₽ — another mid-range gift on top. At STARSEi a star starts at 1.29₽, payment goes through SBP, SberPay, a card, TON or USDT, and delivery runs through the official Telegram flow, the same one used inside the app. Orders are filled automatically, usually in about 11 seconds. Buying Stars for rubles is covered step by step separately.

A subscription as a gift is a story of its own. Telegram Premium is given from the same profile menu: Gift → Telegram Premium → a term of 3, 6 or 12 months, and the subscription switches on for the recipient right away. Paid with Stars, Premium is also arranged as a gift to another person, at roughly 500 ⭐ per month. Paying in rubles is easier on the Telegram Premium page, where the subscription starts at 216₽ per month and the recipient is named by @username; the price breakdown per term is in a separate article.

None of these routes needs access to somebody else's account.

Prices and rates move: the final sum is shown on the order screen before payment. The service works within Telegram rules and delivers Stars through the official messenger flow. This material is informational — collectible gifts are not savings, and the decision to buy is yours.