Show HN: Telepost – Create a blog from a Telegram channel | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Telepost – Create a blog from a Telegram channel

telepost.io

73 pointskossnocorp28 comments

I've made an app that creates blogs from Telegram channels.

Telepost is free. I offer plus account that allows having a custom domain with free SSL powered by Let's Encrypt, embed Google Analytics or have comments, just for €200/year.

If you're interested, hit me at https://t.me/kossnocorp

Good idea but I am not sure if €200 is a little expensive for this kind of service.

@robjan thanks! I have a free plan that must satisfy most of the users. Regarding the price, I understand 200 sounds like a lot. But look it's just €17 per month. For me, it's a reasonable price for a blog platform that updates in nearly real time, provides with free SSL and boosts SEO. I'm an indie dev living in Europe and can't cut the price leveraging the network effect. I have to pay rent and for the infrastructure.

In the future, I'm going to add more cool stuff like AMP, RSS (also podcasts), comments using Telegram login, cross-posting to Twitter and things like that. So I probably will even increase the price or introduce plans limited by features.

I don't see how your infra could cost anywhere near that much. The blogs could be pushed to s3 for pennies, letsencrypt is free, you could probably leverage lambda for the API. Could you shed some more light on your costs?

I’m assuming the cost of themselves as a developer which seems perfectly reasonable.

How much would you charge per hour to develop a similar service and how long would it take you?

I'm unsure of what your purpose is with this post - if you want to compete because you think it is a good business - costs << price - go for it.

I actually just might do that! Wanted to point out to other people who may have been thinking of taking this idea and undercutting on price that the infra most likely doesn't cost anywhere near as much. Given that "infrastructure costs" were cited as a reason for this specific price point, I don't think my comment was unreasonable.

Also, I am genuinely curious to know more about the OP's costs, which is why I asked them for more info.

I run Telepost on Google Cloud, it costs me $70/mo - http://i.ncrp.co/1H3g0k2V402e.

I also pay for the certificate, $100/year. Let's Encrypt is also used, but for custom domains.

But that's not the point. I don't explain price with infrastructure costs but rather explain why I can't be like Netflix and ask $10/mo. That was a mistake on my part to mention it at all.

It's still a product once you account for overheads. 200€ a year isn't "pay my AWS bills for me and get my work for free...", it's "pay what I think this product is worth."

That's totally fair, but the parent mentioned infrastructure costs in response to their posted price. So I don't think bringing up the cost of infrastructure is a non-sequitor. OP could have said, "I think that's a fair price when you factor in the costs of operation, my time, and ongoing maintenance," but they didn't which is why I asked a more pointed question.

Whatever you do, don't take pricing advice from Hacker News! Keep doing what works for you.

Bless you!

I have to pay rent and for the infrastructure.

And at the end of the day, this is why IMO you shouldn't have to justify your pricing to anyone who isn't already a-or ready to commit to becoming a paying customer. It's their feedback that ultimately matters to your ability to pay rent and keep this service going.

Keep doing what you're doing-as a part-time community manager who operates in the Crypto space (a community that has almost thoroughly and entirely embraced Telegram), this kind of product I can forsee will go a great way towards creating community/customer support portals for developers and enthusiasts of coin n.

> And at the end of the day, this is why IMO you shouldn't have to justify your pricing to anyone who isn't already a-or ready to commit to becoming a paying customer. It's their feedback that ultimately matters to your ability to pay rent and keep this service going.

Truth! I just try to explain why the price isn't that low as Netflix.

> Keep doing what you're doing-as a part-time community manager who operates in the Crypto space (a community that has almost thoroughly and entirely embraced Telegram), this kind of product I can forsee will go a great way towards creating community/customer support portals for developers and enthusiasts of coin n.

Bless you

Would it possible to list some demo blogs / accounts here?

I have just tried it with no success so far. But some demo page would help me decide how hard to try here

Here is my channel: https://goindie.xyz

Awesome. Always happy to see Indie Hackers. One question. Do you make enough money from this to sustain yourselves? I had a blogging platform project in mind but I am not sure whether enough people will use the service.

Hey, thanks! I've just released it, so it's too early to say if it will sale enough.

This is an interesting project, thanks for it! I'm trying to setup a blog, but it get stuck when I click on Continue after inserting the channel username :(

I guess my console log may help you:

https://nopaste.xyz/?0f594138a86a875c#M6YpDAZn7r3bKJc98MKvXc...

edit: added a nopaste link

Sorry, it seems like I can't issue SSL certificates anymore as I reached the limit of Let's Encrypt usage (https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/). Whoops! I'm working on it right now.

It turned out that your channel has too many records, so Google Cloud Functions kill my script by timeout. I'll change the approach, and in the future, it will be possible to import a channel regardless of size. Thank you for helping me to find it out.

Ops! Sorry about that! :S and thanks anyway :) still I do very like the idea

I made a similar thing and open source few years ago to quick blog and share things with my family (i dont like much social media) but it was taking me more time to keep with the project than creating content so I stopped developing it

Its nice that you are making a whole product rather than a hack! Congrats!

Thanks!

Created a channel/blog but won't start using it before it adds support for rich formatting (codeblocks, ...). €200/year is ok for me for such a frictionless experience.

Rich formatting is coming!

There is also http://tele.ga/about.html. Not sure how it compares

Tele.ga has more features (RSS, sitemaps, etc.) that I still plan to implement for Telepost. The disadvantage of it that is built on top of the Bot API that has limited abilities. For instance, Tele.ga can't fetch history of your channel (works only for new posts) or handle message deletion request. Telepost has close integration with Telegram; your blog will be complete and always be up to date. Also, Telepost also doesn't require adding a 3rd-party bot to admins of the channel.

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