Telegram returns at most 200 members per request. Every Telegram scraper — or Telegram parser, as half the tools call themselves — paid or pulled from GitHub, is a way around that number: ask Telegram for everyone whose name starts with "a", then "ab", "ac", and so on until the whole list is in. TGuard uses the same trick, only on your own channel. The difference between the two is less about technique and more about whose audience it is.
A scraper can't see another channel's subscribers
Telegram shows a channel's subscribers to its admins and nobody else. Neither a bot nor a user account without admin rights gets that list, however many letters it tries. Groups work differently: any member of a regular group can see the other members, so a scraper only has to join.
That's why "channel audience scraping" sold online is nearly always built from three sources: people who posted in the comments chat linked to the channel, members of public groups on the same topic, and authors of messages found by keyword search. A subscriber who reads the channel and never writes anything doesn't end up in that list. Which is most of any audience.
The list then usually goes into a member adder or a cold DM campaign, and two things follow that the scraper's sales page leaves out. Accounts that mass-invite and message strangers get reported and restricted by Telegram fast. And a list of real people's names and usernames is personal data — messaging them with ads they never agreed to is spam under Telegram's terms and under data protection rules in most countries. Buying such a list, or building one, is a bad bet.
Your own audience you can collect in full
On your own channel the 200-member limit is the same, but the rights are different: you're the admin, so a bot you've made an admin is allowed to ask. That's what TGuard's "🔍 Scan subscribers" is built on.
The bot first takes the most recent joiners, then walks the alphabet: Latin, Cyrillic, digits. Whenever Telegram returns close to the full 200 for a letter, the bot adds a second letter and asks again. After the standard alphabets it goes through the characters that actually showed up in your subscribers' names, which is how Arabic, Chinese and other names outside Latin and Cyrillic get found. The scan stops once it has 99% of the subscriber count Telegram itself reports.
A regular scan takes up to 10 minutes and can run once a day. If a large channel comes back short, the finished scan offers "Deep scan": you create a separate bot in @BotFather, add it to the channel and give TGuard its token. A deep scan can take several hours, but you can run it as many times as you like.
The scan is a snapshot of who's subscribed right now. Everything after you connect, the bot records itself: every join and every leave with its exact time. Why the full history matters is covered in how to view all Telegram channel subscribers.
What's in the table and how to export it
The scan fills a web table for the channel. Its columns are date and time, user, gender, language or country, last seen, subscription status, and the invite link the person joined through. The "📈 Analytics" section of the bot opens ready-made views of the same table:
- all subscribers, with Premium and non-Premium split out;
- bots, meaning fake users;
- deleted accounts and inactive users who haven't been online for a long time;
- Russian-speaking subscribers from CIS countries versus everyone else.
"Export to Excel" downloads every row that matches the current filter, or only the people you've ticked. The file is called tguard.users.csv: a UTF-8 CSV that Excel and Google Sheets open straight away, non-Latin names included. It holds the user ID, name, username, date, status, Premium flag, time subscribed, join link, last seen, gender and country.
A leave isn't a separate column in the export, it's a separate row with the status "unsubscribe". To see who left, filter by status rather than looking for an exit date next to the join date.
What a list of your own subscribers is good for
The most practical column is the join link. You bought ads in three channels, each with its own invite link, and a month later the export shows how many people from each link are still subscribed, how many of them are Premium and how many are bots. That's a more honest cost per subscriber than the count on the day of the purchase.
Second, cleanup. In the bots view you can tick rows and press "Delete selected", up to 5,000 accounts per request. Deleted accounts have their own button, "🗑 Clean deleted accounts", explained in this breakdown. If the bots came in one wave, start with how to remove subscribers from a channel.
Third, talking to advertisers. "✅ Generate cleanness report" puts the share of real subscribers, bots, inactive and deleted accounts into one document you can show a buyer instead of a screenshot of the counter. And "Channels with similar audience" shows what else your readers subscribe to — in other words, where to buy your next ad.
Keeping scrapers out of your group
A channel is protected by Telegram itself: outsiders can't see its subscriber list. Groups and comments chats are the weak spot. In a group with 100 or more members, the group settings have a switch under members that hides the list from regular members. Turn it on if the group is public.
To be straight about the limits: a hidden list doesn't hide anyone who posts. A scraper still collects message authors from the chat history, and neither Telegram nor TGuard has a "block scraping" button. What you can do is keep out the throwaway accounts used for scraping and spamming afterwards. TGuard has a captcha for join requests, a join limit, and an alphabet filter that turns away accounts with names in the scripts you pick before they get in.
How to export your channel's subscribers
- Add @channel_guardian_bot as an admin of your channel.
- In the bot, open "My channels", pick the channel and press "🔍 Scan subscribers".
- Wait for the notification that the scan is done. If a large channel came back short, run "Deep scan".
- In "📈 Analytics", open "👥 All subscribers" or another view, filter it and press "Export to Excel".
Scanning, analytics and export are part of the paid TGuard subscription, and one subscription covers all your channels. There's no free trial, so look through what TGuard can do first and decide whether you need more than the export.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Telegram shows a channel's subscriber list only to its admins. A scraper that promises another channel's audience actually collects people who post in the linked comments chat or sit in public groups on the same topic.
Make TGuard an admin, run Scan subscribers, then open Analytics, choose All subscribers and press Export to Excel. You get a CSV file that Excel and Google Sheets open as is.
In a group with 100 or more members, an admin can hide the member list in the group settings, under members. Regular members then can't see each other, but anyone who posts is still visible in the chat itself.