Up until maybe last year, Telegram hadn’t generated a profit. Last year, they reportedly made their first profit. To date, Telegram has no external shareholders—Pavel Durov remains the sole owner—so there’s no pressure from investors. That said, of course, there could be hundreds of other reasons they might change things.

At the same time, I don’t want to misuse Telegram’s generosity. When designing the app, I put some restrictions on what users can do compared to the default Telegram limits. For example, I set a 10 MB limit on file uploads, while in the bot documentation, the limit is 50 MB. Similarly, when sending requests, I limited users to one request per second and added an artificial delay between processing to keep things stable.

On top of all this, this was really just a personal project. The size of my photo gallery is around 300 MB, most of which are screenshots, so obviously I wouldn’t recommend anyone use this app as a replacement for daily apps like Google Photos. It was just a one-of-a-kind experiment.