Teldrive
- Free allowance
- No fee. 'Teldrive requires PostgreSQL and a Telegram account.' The bytes go into a user's own Telegram channels; the software is MIT-licensed.
- Verdict
- self-hosted, last resortverdict qualifies-with-caveat: usable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path. Self-hosted options are listed last, because this site is for users who have no hardware.
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- any-phoneno card, phone required
- Binding limit
- per-object-caplargest single object
- Evidence
- documented3 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-23checked 2026-10-23 (live); stale on 2026-11-23
| Free tier | No fee. 'Teldrive requires PostgreSQL and a Telegram account.' The bytes go into a user's own Telegram channels; the software is MIT-licensed. unit unlimited; metered on stored-bytes; 'unlimited' is Telegram's own claim about the account, not Teldrive's about itself |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits | |
| Binding | per-object-cap Teldrive cannot change the object ceiling; it only hides it. At 1 TiB/month the 2 GB cap still splits every large object, and the account's upload flood limits (FLOOD_PREMIUM_WAIT_X on a non-Premium account) shape the rate. |
| Identity | any-phone A Telegram account plus api_id/api_hash, and a PostgreSQL instance a user must run. This is software, not a hosted service. |
| Egress | Telegram's own terms; downloads come from Telegram's media DCs, at the speed a free account is allowed. free allowance: no allowance published |
| Per-object cap | Inherits Telegram's per-object ceiling: 2 GB on a free account, 4 GB with Premium. |
| Retention | As long as the Telegram account and the channel survive. The project warns: 'Accounts and stored files can become unavailable; keep independent backups.' |
| Interface | rest, rclone, cli 'Telegram-backed file storage with a web interface, an HTTP API, and rclone integration.' Login is by Telegram account, and channels are synced from the UI. |
| Tooling | Linux/Windows binaries, Nix, Docker or Podman; a maintained rclone fork (tgdrive/rclone) supplies the backend. PostgreSQL is mandatory. |
| Composes with | Turns a set of Telegram channels into one mounted filesystem, which is the only way to make the per-object cap stop being the unit of work: a user sees files, the backend shards them. |
| Reliability | The project ships its own warning: 'Follow Telegram's terms and API limits. Accounts and stored files can become unavailable; keep independent backups.' A ban takes the whole drive with it. |
| Notes | This is software a user must run, unlike every bot. It is recorded because it is the only maintained path that presents Telegram as a filesystem, and because the free compute tier can host it; abandon if the PostgreSQL requirement or the rclone fork stops being maintained. |
| Evidence note | documented Requirements and the data-safety sentence are from the repository read. No instance was deployed, so the effective throughput is unmeasured. |
| Parsed numbers |
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Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | github.com/tgdrive/teldrive | 'Teldrive requires PostgreSQL and a Telegram account.' and 'Telegram-backed file storage with a web interface, an HTTP API, and rclone integration.' |
| 2026-10-23 | github.com/tgdrive/teldrive | part of the text of Reliability, above |
| 2026-10-23 | teldrive-docs.pages.dev/docs/ | 'organize your Telegram files and unlock their full potential as cloud storage' with an rclone mount and optional encryption |