What is telegram stars and how to buy IT in 2027

Arjun MehtaLast Updated: 2026/11/11

FaceAI's top-up dialog lists several payment methods. Card, USDT and Telegram Stars sit in the same dropdown. The first two ask for something you may not have, either a working international card or a funded crypto wallet. Stars ask for a Telegram account with a balance, which most people already have on their phone.

The tradeoff is price, and how much you lose depends on where you buy the Stars. Both halves matter before you start: the cheapest way to get Stars, and what the whole path ends up costing.

The order below runs from cost to Stars to checkout to confirming the credits landed. One step in the middle trips up a lot of people, so it gets its own section.

The cost difference on ways to buy Telegram Stars

Paying with Stars differs from paying by card in two places: what you have to hand over, and what the purchase ends up costing.

That last row matters most. Every FaceAI package is priced in US dollars. The Stars figure is converted by the payment provider at the moment you place the order, so whatever you paid per Star sets the real cost of that purchase.

At in-app purchase rates, roughly $0.02 per Star, the Popular package runs about forty percent more than paying by card. At Fragment rates, roughly $0.0141 per Star, it lands close to even.

The step count explains why people accept the surcharge. Paying with Stars means no card number typed into a site you just met, and no switching between a wallet and a browser tab. Every confirmation happens inside Telegram. For someone without an international card, convenience barely enters into it: this is the path that opens at all.

What Telegram Stars actually are

Telegram launched Stars in June 2024 as an in-app currency for digital goods and services: paid posts in channels, bot features, Mini App items and subscriptions, gifts, and tips.

Stars are not cryptocurrency. There is no wallet address and nothing on a chain. The balance you see in Telegram is a number attached to your account, closer to an App Store balance than to a token. The blockchain only enters the picture at withdrawal, when Stars are converted to TON.

That matters for payment: because nothing touches a chain, paying with Stars involves no block confirmations and no risk of sending to the wrong address.

Buying Telegram Stars Step by Step

Step1. Finding the entry point

Open Telegram, go to Settings, and scroll down to My Stars.

It sits below Telegram Premium and above Telegram Business, next to Send a Gift. Tapping it shows your balance and transaction history.

Some accounts do not show this item at all. That is by design. A new or lightly used account has to interact with Stars-enabled content once before the entry appears. Find a channel that takes Star reactions, tap the star icon under a post, then check Settings again.

Step 2. Four routes to buy Telegram Stars

In-app purchase to buy Telegram Stars

Tap Buy More Stars inside My Stars, or use the purchase sheet that appears when a Mini App finds your balance short. Both go through Apple's or Google's billing.

Apple and Google each take thirty percent, and that cost shows up in the price. Call it two cents per Star.

Buy Telegram Stars through @PremiumBot

This is the official bot. Search the name in Telegram and send /stars to get a package list.

Cheaper than in-app purchase by a visible margin, with 1,000 Stars at $15.69. The same packages appear in other languages, with only the row labels translated:

Packages run from 100 Stars up to 150,000. Payment still settles through the app store, but the sticker price is already lower than buying directly inside the app.

Buy Telegram Stars from Fragment

fragment.com is Telegram's official marketplace, where you can swap TON for Stars directly.

You set the amount yourself anywhere from 50 to 1,000,000, or pick a preset. Prices are quoted in TON, which skips Apple and Google entirely, making this the cheapest official route. The process is: install a TON wallet, fund it, sign in to Fragment with your Telegram account, enter an amount, confirm. Once it settles, a Stars Top-Up line appears in your My Stars history.

The friction is that you need TON first. If you have never touched crypto, registering on an exchange, buying coins and moving them to a wallet will cost more time than the few dollars you save.

Four: app store gift cards. For anyone with no card at all, there is this path. Buy an App Store or Google Play gift card, redeem it into your store balance, then buy Stars in-app with that balance.

The price matches in-app purchase at two cents per Star. The advantage is that no payment method gets attached to anything. Gift cards are sold by online retailers and convenience stores, with denominations starting around ten dollars. The only downside is cost, roughly thirty percent more than @PremiumBot, but it solves a specific problem: having no card whatsoever.

What the routes cost to buy Telegram Stars

Telegram's own reference price works out to $14.10 per 1,000 Stars. Fragment tracks that number closely, @PremiumBot sits a little above it, and in-app purchase plus gift cards are the expensive end.

Here is the full ladder in a UK account, which shows how little the bulk discount buys you:

From 100 Stars to 150,000 the unit price falls, but only slightly. Buying 100,000 Stars costs under ten percent less per Star than buying 500, so there is no reason to stockpile for a wholesale rate.

For most people @PremiumBot is the right call. Twenty percent cheaper than in-app purchase, no crypto involved, and the whole thing takes a handful of taps.

Wait and Confirm the Telegram Stars arrived

Go back to My Stars and check the balance and the history.

A matching balance and a matching history line mean the money is in. Crediting sometimes lags by a few seconds, and if you start a purchase on the site before the balance refreshes, the checkout cannot see enough Stars and the order fails outright, sending you back to the beginning. Waiting for the balance before moving on saves a repeat.

One more thing, and it is not obvious from the interface: bought Stars cannot be cashed out.

Telegram keeps two kinds of balance. Stars you paid for are spendable only. Only earnings from channels, bots and Mini Apps can be converted. Withdrawal requires holding for 21 days, a balance of at least 1,000 Stars, and a conversion to TON through Fragment.

The two buttons sit next to each other, but only accounts that have earned Stars see Withdraw as active. For anyone who bought their balance, that column is greyed out or missing.

So buying Stars to flip later does not work. Treat them like arcade tokens: once bought, the only direction is out through spending.

Buying credits on FaceAI using Telegram Stars

With Stars in hand, switch to faceai.art.

The four packages

The top three already include a thirty percent bonus in the credit figure, so it lands in your balance on payment with nothing extra to claim. Starter carries no bonus, which is why its unit price looks worst, but it is a first-purchase tier: one per account for life, visible only to accounts that have never paid before.

Unit cost falls from 1.92 cents at Starter to 1.39 cents at Studio. If you know you will keep using the site, Creator is the point where the curve flattens, more than twenty percent cheaper per credit than Starter without committing two hundred plus dollars at once. For image work alone, Popular covers a long stretch.

What those credits turn into matters as much as the price. Photo face swap runs 1 credit per image, video face swap 1 credit per second, and multi-person video 2 credits per second. So 2,080 credits is 2,080 swapped photos, or 34 minutes of single-person video, depending on what you do. AI image generation is priced separately at 5 credits per image. Video burns through a balance far faster than stills, so decide the use case before picking a tier.

Opening the top-up dialog

Three entry points after you sign in. The credit capsule in the top right opens the dialog when clicked. The account menu has a Buy Credits button under the balance. And when a free allowance runs out, the dialog opens on its own.

One quirk: if you click the capsule on an account with no balance and no purchase history, the site opens the pricing page first so you can read the packages. The buy button there leads back to the dialog.

Inside, the dialog runs top to bottom as a promo bar, the package list, then payment methods. The promo bar reads "Get 30% extra credits on any package," each package row shows price and credits received, and below that sit the payment options. Each row also carries two small lines, one for how many images those credits cover and one for the per-credit price. Those two lines compare tiers better than the headline price does, since a bigger total does not always mean a better rate.

Selecting Telegram Stars

Pick the option with the star icon. Its description reads:

Supports USDT (TRC20) or Telegram Stars. Packages are priced in USD; the checkout will confirm the final amount.

That second sentence is the one to notice. Every package on the site is priced in dollars, and the Star count is computed by the payment provider at order time. So the dialog shows $29.99 and Telegram shows a Star figure, and the two will not match, because the rate moves daily. Going by official Star prices, Popular lands somewhere between 1,500 and 2,300 Stars. The checkout figure is the one that counts.

This route does not ask for an email. In some cases the field appears marked optional, and leaving it blank still completes the payment.

Confirming inside Telegram

Tap pay and the site hands off to Telegram's checkout, the screen at the top of this article: product name, Star price, two buttons. Tapping OPEN INVOICE hands control to the Telegram client, which raises a confirmation dialog:

The line above shows the product and merchant, with a star icon ahead of the price. Check three things: what you are buying, how much it costs, and who receives it. When all three match, press Confirm and Pay.

On mobile the same content arrives as a sheet rising from the bottom, with the confirm button in the same place:

Confirmation happens inside the Telegram client. The account needs to be signed in, the Stars balance needs to cover it, and two-step verification may ask for your cloud password. After that Telegram reports success and returns you to the site's payment result page.

A detail that trips people up: buying Stars and buying credits are two separate transactions. When you buy credits, Stars are the currency and prices appear in Stars. When you buy Stars, the local currency is the currency and prices appear in money. The same flow therefore shows you Star counts and dollar amounts in turn, which is normal.

When the balance comes up short

This is the step where the path most often stalls.

Open the checkout with too few Stars and Telegram raises a top-up sheet with the shortfall in its title:

The packages offered tend to overshoot. Here the order needs 1,500 Stars and the smallest option is 2,500, a thousand more than required. You can take the suggested tier, or back out and buy an exact amount from @PremiumBot.

Whatever you choose, the critical step comes after: topping up does not complete the purchase. The invoice that failed does not revive itself and nothing gets charged automatically. You have to return to the site and place the order again, or reopen the original invoice page and pay once more, before credits arrive.

Plenty of people stop here, assuming that a topped-up balance means a finished purchase, then find their credits unchanged. The order is: top up, go back to the site, order again, confirm again.

Do not use the wrong payment entry

Everything above concerns buying credits on the site. If you use Stars to buy something inside Telegram itself, such as a channel subscription or a bot service, the payment panel looks like this:

The confirmation logic is the same, but the product is a subscription rather than a credit package. Buying site credits never leads here. Reaching this screen means you tapped a channel's or bot's paid entry, so go back and start from the site.

Confirming the credits landed

Check two places on the site: the order status on the payment result page, and the credit balance in the account panel. Both matching means you are done.

If the result page reports success but the balance has not moved, hit refresh in the panel or reopen the dialog, and the number usually appears. Third-party settlement sometimes runs a few seconds to a minute behind the page.

What credits cost per task

Multi-person video and GIF cost double because more than one face is processed per frame. With video, length drives the total directly: a 30-second multi-person clip is 60 credits.

Three ways people do this

By use case, most purchases fall into one of three shapes.

No crypto, want to start now. Buy about 2,100 Stars from @PremiumBot for thirty-four dollars or so, then pick Popular on the site. That saves eight or nine dollars over buying Stars in-app on iOS, and costs two or three more than paying by card. The premium buys you not typing a card number.

Have TON, want the floor price. Buy 4,960 Stars on Fragment for about seventy dollars' worth, then pick Creator. Total cost lands roughly level with a card payment, and no card details or billing email enter the process at any point.

No card at all. Buy an App Store gift card, redeem it, and purchase about 710 Stars at in-app rates, then pick Starter. Around three dollars more than @PremiumBot, but it needs no payment instrument whatsoever.

Separately, the site hands out a free daily allowance for check-ins, covering image and video generations. If you want to see output quality before spending anything, run a few free generations first.

After you recevied your credits

Credits sit in the account until a task runs, so nothing is spent at the moment of purchase.

Photo face swap

Upload the photo you want to keep, plus one clear photo of the face going in, then hit Swap faces. A single swap costs 1 credit. Batch runs work in one direction only: either several target photos with one face, or one target photo with several faces, up to five on whichever side holds the many. Images can be up to 20 MB, in JPG, PNG or WEBP.

Replace face in photo

Swap face in a photo just 1 credit

Try this case

Video face swap

Same operation on moving footage. Upload the clip, choose the face, and trim the segment before submitting, because billing follows the segment you actually render at 1 credit per second. Clips up to 30 minutes and 500 MB are accepted; the trim starts at eight seconds, which keeps a first test down to single digits.

Swap Face in video

More than a frame, replace by seconds

Try this case

Leftover Stars

Buying in fixed packages rarely lands exactly on the amount you need. Buy 2,100 Stars for a Popular package that charges 2,080, and twenty-odd Stars stay behind. They do not expire and cannot be withdrawn.

Since they are loose change, spending them beats leaving them. Telegram lets you react to posts with Stars: tap the star icon under a post and pick an amount on the slider.

Tick Show me in Top Senders and your name appears on the post's tipping leaderboard.

Gifts work too. Open someone's profile, use the top-right menu, and choose Send a Gift:

The cheap ones run a dozen Stars, the expensive ones three hundred. Limited-edition gifts can be resold on Fragment, which converts Stars back into TON by a longer path.

Creator profiles also carry a Support Creator panel for tipping directly:

Three presets: 1 Star, 5 Stars, 10 Stars.

All three are pure spending, with nothing coming back. If you want a balance emptied without waste, gifting and letting the recipient resell recovers a little value, but only a little.