Developer-first SaaS API for EU VAT validation via VIES with Redis caching, change monitoring, and webhook notifications.
Iurii Builds: Telegram Bots & Mini Apps
from €1,600A bot your customers or staff actually use — orders, bookings, support, internal lookups — plus Mini Apps with payments inside Telegram. From €1,600.
Based in Finland (UTC+2) · VAT-registered FI29845875 · Respond within 24 hours
Recent client work
A bot is not a notification channel. Sending an alert into a chat takes an afternoon. A bot is a product: it has a conversation flow, it remembers state between messages, it reads and writes your real data, it takes payments, and someone has to be able to run it after launch. Those are two completely different pieces of work, and mixing them up is why so many bots are abandoned within a month.
Telegram is worth building on for one blunt reason: there is nothing to install and nothing to log into. No app store review, no password reset, no onboarding funnel — your customer taps a link and is inside your product. For a booking flow, an order status lookup, or a support queue, that removes most of the friction that kills adoption. Mini Apps go further: a full web interface running inside the chat, with Telegram handling identity and payments.
What I build: bots that do a job in your business, not demos. Ordering and booking flows, support triage that routes to a human when it should, internal tools where staff look something up or approve something without opening a laptop, and Mini Apps where the interface needs to be more than a chat.
For context on the platform: I've run Telegram in production as an operational channel — alerting for an open-source site-monitoring tool and execution notifications for an event-driven trading system. The bot work builds on the same API, with the product layer on top.
Bot or Mini App — which one you actually need
These are two different builds with two different price tags, and the wrong choice is expensive. The rule of thumb is how much interface the task needs:
- A bot is a conversation: commands, buttons, menus, a few steps at a time. Perfect for status lookups, approvals, support triage, notifications people can reply to, and simple ordering with a handful of choices.
- A Mini App is a web app running inside Telegram: catalogues, filters, carts, calendars, dashboards, anything where a chat would need twenty messages to do what one screen does.
- Payments work in both. Telegram handles card payments through connected providers and Stars for digital goods, so the customer never leaves the chat to pay.
- Identity comes free. Telegram tells you who the user is — no signup form, no password, no email verification. For internal tools that alone removes an entire layer of work.
- Both need the boring half: a database, an admin view for the person running it, logging, and an error path when your CRM or payment provider is down. This is the half that decides whether the bot still works in three months.
- Most first builds are a bot. Start with the flow that has real usage, then add a Mini App when the interface genuinely outgrows the chat — not the other way round.
What's included
- Conversation design — the flow, the menus, and what happens when the user says something unexpected
- State and storage: a real database behind the bot, not in-memory state that dies on restart
- Integration with the systems you already run — CRM, ERP, spreadsheets, your own API, or a webshop
- Payments inside Telegram (card providers or Stars) with order records you can reconcile
- Mini App (Next.js) when the task needs a real interface instead of a chat flow
- Admin side: who can use what, an operator view, and alerts when something fails
- Deployment, monitoring, and logs — plus the source code and the hosting setup, in your accounts
How I approach this
01
Define the job
One sentence: what should a person be able to do in the bot that they can't do easily today? If we can't write that sentence, the bot shouldn't be built yet.
02
Map the flow
Every screen, every button, every dead end — including what the bot does with a message it doesn't understand and where a human takes over.
03
Build and test in Telegram
You get a working bot to poke at early, not a demo at the end. Payments and integrations are tested against sandbox environments first.
04
Launch and hand over
Deployed with monitoring and logging, source code and credentials handed to you, and a short written walkthrough of how to run it and what to do when something breaks.
Terms & conditions
From €1,600 for a bot with a defined flow, storage, and one integration. Mini Apps and payment flows are quoted on top, after the scope is written down.
Hosting runs in your accounts and is billed by the provider, not by me — typically a few euros a month.
Ongoing changes after handover are hourly or a small monthly retainer, your choice. No lock-in: the code is yours.
Relevant projects
View all projects
Open-source Python tool that discovers URLs from sitemap.xml, validates each in desktop and mobile modes with parallel checks, monitors domain registrations
Related articles
View all articles· 13 min
Prevent overselling under concurrent checkouts: reservations vs hard decrements, SELECT FOR UPDATE, deadlock-safe multi-line carts, and the payment window.
· 17 min
Subscription billing edge cases Stripe glosses over: proration, dunning, the state machine, cancellation timing, refunds, VAT, and webhook ordering.
AvailableReady to discuss your telegram bots & mini apps project?
Tell me what you're building or stuck with. I'll reply within 24 hours.