Telegram Stars calculator: Stars to USD both ways

Telegram Stars are the currency for everything digital inside Telegram — paid posts, channel subscriptions, courses, gifts, files sold by bots. Almost every guide quotes one price for a Star. There are two, and mixing them up is how people plan a month of revenue and end up a third short.

The two prices of one Star

What a buyer pays: about $0.019 per Star. Approximate on purpose. Telegram sells Stars in packs and prices them regionally, so the same 500 Stars costs a little more in one country than in another, and larger packs come out cheaper per Star. On iOS and Android the purchase goes through the app store, which takes its cut right there.

What a creator receives: $0.013 per Star. This one is not approximate. Telegram’s terms for bot developers state that a developer can receive an equivalent of 0.013 USD worth of rewards for each Star, and Telegram’s client configuration says the same thing from the other end: one thousand Stars withdraw as thirteen dollars.

The gap between the two is roughly 31.6% — near enough a third. It is not a platform fee, and nobody deducts it at withdrawal. It is the app-store commission plus tax, collected at the moment the Star was bought, long before it reached anyone’s balance. If you want the whole mechanism rather than the arithmetic, what Telegram Stars are and how they work covers it.

Stars to USD, both directions

Stars	A buyer pays	A creator receives
100	~$1.90	$1.30
250	~$4.75	$3.25
500	~$9.50	$6.50
1,000	~$19.00	$13.00
1,500	~$28.50	$19.50
5,000	~$95.00	$65.00

What the floor and the hold actually mean

Two limits decide when money becomes money, and both are published as Telegram client-config parameters rather than in any announcement, which is why they rarely make it into articles.

The floor is 1,000 Stars. A balance below that cannot be withdrawn at all. At the payout rate that is thirteen dollars — so a channel with a handful of small sales is holding value it cannot move yet.

The hold is up to 21 days, counted from when each payment arrives, not from when you ask. The clock runs per payment. A channel earning steadily always has a rolling slice of its balance that has not aged enough, which is why “withdraw on the first of the month” quietly leaves the last three weeks behind. The calendar version of this, with a worked example, is in how to withdraw Telegram Stars.

The payout itself arrives through Fragment, in Toncoin, to a connected wallet — not to a bank account. Getting from there to a local currency is a separate step with its own fees, and Telegram’s terms note that Fragment may be unavailable in some countries.

About the local currency amounts

Both Star prices are quoted in USD, so every other currency in the selector is a conversion at a stored exchange rate, dated under the results. That is enough to answer “roughly how much is this”, and not enough to quote a customer. Two things move underneath it: the exchange rate itself, and Telegram’s regional pack pricing, which shifts the buy-side column independently of any currency market.

What to do with the second number

Price with it. If a guide sells for 500 Stars, the revenue line is $6.50, not $9.50. Every projection built on the buy-side figure is about a third optimistic, and that error compounds quietly across a catalogue.

Then decide whether you want dollars at all. Earned Stars spent inside Telegram — on Premium gifts for subscribers, on ads for your own channel — carry their buy-side value rather than the payout rate, because you are spending them into the same economy they came from. Withdrawing is the only route that pays the $0.013.

And if the products themselves are the missing piece: paid subscriptions, single paywalled posts and donation goals all run on this balance, and monetizing a Telegram channel is where that setup lives. Digital goods are Stars-only under Telegram’s rules — cards are not an option for them, whatever a competitor’s pricing page implies.

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Sources, checked September 2026: Telegram’s terms for bot developers, section 6.2.4, for the $0.013 reward rate and the 21-day hold; Telegram’s client configuration reference for the 1,000-Star withdrawal minimum and the withdraw rate. Buyer-side prices are approximate and vary by region and pack size. Exchange rates are a dated snapshot, shown with the result.