Which Telegram Mini Apps are making real money now?

Are Telegram Mini Apps actually making serious money now?

Telegram Mini Apps are making serious money now, but only a small group has enough evidence behind it for us to say that confidently.

The strongest disclosed cases already reach well into seven figures. Catizen reported about $35 million in 2024 revenue from roughly 1.2 million paying users. Pavel Durov said Major generated more than $10 million during its first five months. Memhash reportedly made $500,000 in ten days. More recently, GAMEE reported $3.5 million of revenue for 2025 and another $926,000 in the first quarter of 2026.

Those businesses do not make money in the same way. Catizen sold in-game items. Major monetized users competing for status and rewards. Memhash sold participation and upgrades around a mining game. GAMEE combines gaming with brand campaigns and commercial partnerships.

The apps grossing heavily today have shifted again. FindMini's daily Telegram Mini App ranking currently has Epic Gift, Тюряга, Boinkers, Random Games and Gorilla Case in its top five. AI, social discovery and other games occupy much of the rest of the top ten.

That gives us a fairly clear answer already. Telegram can produce multimillion-dollar Mini App businesses, while the current money is spreading beyond the tap-to-earn model that originally made the category famous.

Telegram Mini App or business	Revenue evidence	What the evidence tells us
Catizen	≈$35M reported in 2024	Direct consumer spending can reach tens of millions
Major	>$10M in first five months	Launch-driven monetization can get very large
Memhash	≈$500K in ten days	Telegram can monetize viral traffic extremely fast
GAMEE	≈$3.5M in 2025; $926K in Q1 2026	Revenue can continue after the tap-to-earn boom
Epic Gift, Boinkers, Gorilla Case	Revenue undisclosed	Currently among Telegram's highest-grossing Mini Apps

Why is it so hard to know which Telegram Mini Apps make the most money?

Telegram Mini App revenue is still unusually opaque, so anyone claiming to know the exact highest-earning apps today is working with incomplete information.

Private developers rarely publish full accounts. Telegram exposes payment tools and developer revenue statistics privately, but it does not publish a public dollar leaderboard. Third-party services such as FindMini can rank Mini Apps by grossing activity, yet those rankings do not disclose the actual amount earned.

Crypto makes the picture even messier. Token trading volume, token market value, assets deposited and transaction volume are often presented next to genuine operating revenue even though they are completely different things. A token reaching a $500 million valuation does not mean its Mini App earned $500 million.

Large financial products create another problem. A wallet or exchange may acquire a user through Telegram and earn fees when that user trades, but the company usually reports the revenue together with its wider business. We cannot cleanly assign that money to the Mini App.

So we have to be stricter than simply ranking headlines. We give the most weight to disclosed revenue, then to current grossing position, and then to clear paid activity such as Stars purchases, subscriptions, advertising or transaction fees. Large user numbers are useful context, but they are weak proof of revenue by themselves.

Is Catizen still the strongest proof that a Telegram Mini App can make millions?

Catizen remains the clearest proof that Telegram Mini App users will spend tens of millions of dollars inside a product, even though Catizen itself is much smaller on Telegram today.

Catizen's 2024 annual report put cumulative revenue at roughly $35 million from about 1.2 million paying users. That works out to around $29 of revenue per payer.

Earlier figures tell a similar story. Catizen had reported around $20 million of in-game purchases from approximately 590,000 paying users, or roughly $34 per payer. The exact figure moved as the audience expanded, but spending stayed substantial.

The payment mix is even more useful. During one three-month period after the CATI token launch, Catizen said its Mini App Center generated roughly $19 million. About $8.8 million came through Telegram Stars, $4.2 million through CATI and $3.6 million through TON.

That is much stronger evidence than a token valuation because users were actually buying things inside the ecosystem.

Catizen's current Telegram audience tells another side of the story. Telegram now shows about 83,000 monthly users for the Catizen bot, dramatically below the tens of millions who played during the boom. Catizen has expanded beyond that individual bot, so the number does not represent its entire business. Still, we should not read the old $35 million figure as a current annual run rate.

Catizen's real importance is simpler: it proved that a Telegram Mini App can convert a few percent of a huge free audience into more than a million paying customers.

Is Major still making anything close to its first $10 million?

Major clearly made real money, but its current Telegram audience makes it very unlikely that the first five months still represent the size of the business today.

Pavel Durov said Major earned more than $10 million while attracting 70 million users during its first five months. Even without knowing exactly when the revenue arrived, that was an unusually large monetization event for a Mini App that had barely existed.

Major made money partly by letting users pay to improve their position inside a points-driven competition. The attraction of a future token brought users in, while paid boosts turned some of that attention into immediate revenue.

The product has since expanded into NFT gifts, verification, escrow, Telegram-number rentals and other services. Major says more than 75 million people have used its ecosystem in total.

Current activity is far smaller. Telegram now shows roughly 125,000 monthly users for Major. Compared with the tens of millions of users reached around launch, that is a drop of well over 99%.

The old $10 million figure is still useful as proof that Telegram Mini Apps can monetize a launch extremely well. It tells us much less about how much Major earns these days.

Did Memhash really make $500,000 in ten days?

Memhash appears to have genuinely made about $500,000 in its first ten days, making it one of the clearest examples of how fast a viral Telegram Mini App can turn attention into payments.

Durov highlighted Memhash after the app had spent ten days inside Telegram's four highest-grossing Mini Apps. According to his account, one developer built the product in two days without a marketing budget.

At $500,000 in ten days, Memhash briefly ran at the equivalent of roughly $1.5 million per 30 days. We should not annualize that into a supposed $18 million business because launch revenue rarely behaves that smoothly. The useful point is the speed at which users started spending.

Memhash had a particularly strong setup for that moment. Users paid Stars around a mining game tied to future crypto rewards, while the app was spreading organically through Telegram.

That combination is harder to reproduce now. The Telegram Mini App market is much more crowded, users have already experienced several disappointing airdrops, and Memhash itself did not maintain that launch-level visibility indefinitely.

So the famous $500,000 figure is credible evidence of Telegram's monetization speed. It is a poor benchmark for what a normal new Mini App should expect.

Which Telegram Mini Apps are grossing the most today?

Telegram's highest-grossing Mini Apps today are led by gift games, social games and paid utilities rather than by the famous tap-to-earn apps that dominated attention during the first boom.

FindMini updates its grossing ranking daily. Epic Gift currently sits first, followed by Тюряга, Boinkers, Random Games and Gorilla Case. Telescope, DUCK × MY × DUCK, VIRUS BOT, an AI service combining GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Midjourney and other models, and Frog Case complete the current top ten.

The user counts make the ranking more interesting. Тюряга has only about 168,000 monthly users yet sits second. Random Games has around 194,000. Both currently outrank apps with close to or above one million monthly users.

That immediately tells us that audience size is no longer enough to understand Telegram Mini App economics.

Several of the highest-grossing products revolve around Telegram Gifts, Stars, randomized rewards or paid game mechanics. AI has also reached the top ten with a much more conventional proposition: users pay to access expensive models and media-generation tools.

We still cannot translate a FindMini position into dollars. The ranking is valuable because it tells us where spending is happening now, while the exact revenue remains private.

Current grossing rank	Telegram Mini App	Approx. monthly users	Main product
1	Epic Gift	1.0M	Gift cases
2	Тюряга	168K	Social game
3	Boinkers	950K	Social game
4	Random Games	194K	Stars deposits, games and giveaways
5	Gorilla Case	600K	Gift cases
6	Telescope	1.6M	Social discovery
7	DUCK × MY × DUCK	995K	Social game
8	VIRUS BOT	1.5M	Game
9	GPT / DeepSeek / Midjourney	2.4M	AI tools
10	Frog Case	487K	Stars, gifts and tasks

Why are Telegram gift and case Mini Apps making so much money?

Telegram gift and case Mini Apps are currently one of the strongest money-making categories because users are paying directly for digital items they already understand and can keep inside Telegram.

Epic Gift sits at the top of the current grossing ranking with roughly one million monthly users. Users open cases containing collectible Telegram gifts. Gorilla Case uses a similar idea with about 600,000 monthly users and adds mechanics such as roulette, slots, upgrades and raffles.

The pattern goes much further than two apps. Gift Go, Edge Gift, Easy Gift, Gifts Battle, Rolls and Giftomania also appear in the broader grossing ecosystem.

That repetition tells us the category has moved beyond one lucky hit. Developers keep building around the same behavior because users are willing to put Stars into it.

Telegram's collectible gifts also have a stronger spending loop than the old tap-to-earn formula. A user buys Stars, spends them immediately and receives a digital item or a chance to win one. The purchase itself creates the entertainment.

Some of these products use mechanics that can resemble gambling, especially when randomized rewards have meaningful resale value. That could become a serious regulatory or platform issue. From a revenue perspective, though, the model currently works because payment happens before the reward rather than months later through a promised airdrop.

Is Boinkers becoming one of Telegram's biggest Mini App businesses?

Boinkers currently looks like one of Telegram's strongest emerging Mini App businesses, although there is still no reliable public dollar figure for its revenue.

Boinkers has roughly 950,000 monthly users and currently sits around third in FindMini's grossing ranking. That combination puts it in a very different position from the older crypto games that needed tens of millions of users before monetization became visible.

The game revolves around social competition, spins, rewards and crypto-flavored mechanics. More importantly, Boinkers continues to operate like a business trying to acquire and monetize users rather than a campaign simply collecting registrations before an airdrop.

Its grossing position shows that money is coming in now. What we still cannot see is how much of that spending turns into profit after user acquisition, rewards, development and other operating costs.

So Boinkers belongs among the strongest current Telegram Mini Apps to watch, but below Catizen or GAMEE when the question requires hard financial evidence rather than ranking data.

Can an AI Telegram Mini App really make good money?

AI Telegram Mini Apps can clearly generate meaningful revenue now, and one of Telegram's largest AI services is already inside the platform's current top ten grossing apps.

The app listed by FindMini as GPT 4 | DeepSeek | Midjourney has about 2.4 million monthly users. It combines access to models and services including GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Midjourney, Kling and Suno.

The business model is straightforward. Text inference, image generation, video generation and music generation all cost money to provide. Developers can give users limited free access and charge Stars for additional generations or premium plans.

Telegram made that model stronger by adding recurring Star subscriptions. Its Mini App documentation now explicitly supports paid subscription tiers, while digital goods sold inside Telegram have to use Stars.

AI also fits the Telegram interface unusually well. Users are already accustomed to messaging a bot. A Mini App adds menus, image uploads, generation controls and payment without forcing the user to install another application.

Margins remain uncertain because the developer must pay underlying model providers or infrastructure costs. Video generation in particular can be expensive.

Still, an AI service with 2.4 million monthly Telegram users sitting inside today's grossing top ten is no longer an experimental use case. People are already paying for it.

Is GAMEE making more durable money than the old tap-to-earn games?

GAMEE currently gives us some of the best evidence of a Telegram gaming business that kept generating revenue after the original crypto-game rush cooled down.

An SEC filing linked to Alpha Compute's acquisition of GAMEE reported estimated revenue of $3.5 million in 2025. GAMEE then generated about $926,000 in the first quarter of 2026, up 56% from roughly $593,000 a year earlier.

If the latest quarter were simply repeated four times, GAMEE would land near $3.7 million of annual revenue. That is only a rough run-rate calculation, but it shows that the business has not fallen off a cliff since 2025.

GAMEE also reported 1.7 million monthly active users and 150,000 daily active users across its platforms. More than 61 million of its 120 million registered users had come through Telegram.

Its commercial model now goes beyond ordinary in-game purchases. In one 2026 collaboration with Azuki, GAMEE attracted about 315,000 users who produced 27 million game plays. Other campaigns involve brands and intellectual property owners paying GAMEE to build and distribute experiences.

This is a more conventional business than many of the tap-to-earn hits. GAMEE sells attention, game development and engagement to companies while also running consumer games.

The limitation is that GAMEE operates outside Telegram too, so the reported revenue cannot all be attributed to Mini Apps. Even with that caveat, continued year-on-year growth makes GAMEE one of the stronger examples of durable monetization connected to Telegram.

Can Telegram Mini Apps make real money from advertising?

Telegram Mini Apps can make real money from advertising, but ad revenue becomes interesting only when users keep returning often enough to generate a lot of impressions.

Hamster Kombat is the biggest historical example. Its founders told Wired that the business was already profitable while the game was exploding in popularity. They said revenue came from advertising inside the game, YouTube advertising and Telegram's own channel-ad revenue sharing.

Hamster Kombat had the audience to make that work. More than 300 million people reportedly tried the game, and its Telegram channel became one of the largest on the platform.

Smaller Mini Apps face much tougher arithmetic. At an effective $1 earned per thousand ad impressions, $100,000 in monthly revenue requires around 100 million monetized impressions. Even at $3 per thousand, the app still needs more than 33 million.

That is why repeat usage matters far more than registrations. A game with one million people opening it every day can build a decent advertising business. An airdrop app that collects ten million users who disappear after a week has much less useful inventory.

Advertising therefore works best as part of a product users already want to reopen.

Do millions of Telegram Mini App users actually mean much?

Millions of Telegram Mini App users tell us surprisingly little about revenue unless we also know how many users pay, how often they return and what they spend.

The current grossing table makes the problem obvious. Тюряга has roughly 168,000 monthly users and currently ranks second in grossing. Random Games has about 194,000 and ranks fourth. Telescope has around 1.6 million users but sits below both.

Historical data makes the gap even wider. Catizen reported roughly $35 million from more than 55 million players and about 1.2 million paying users. That equals around $29 of revenue per payer but only about $0.64 for every player acquired.

Hamster Kombat reached more than 300 million total players and above 150 million monthly users at peak, yet its revenue was never publicly disclosed at anything close to Catizen's level of detail.

Major reached around 70 million users while making more than $10 million during its first five months. Today, its Telegram bot has roughly 125,000 monthly users.

The same pattern now appears inside Telegram's live grossing table: smaller audiences can outrank apps several times their size.

The useful metric is not how many people opened a Mini App once. We want to know how many still come back and spend.

Telegram Mini App	Audience evidence	Revenue evidence	What we can actually conclude
Catizen	55M+ players historically	≈$35M	Strong payer conversion created a large business
Major	70M users historically	>$10M in five months	Huge launch, much smaller audience today
Hamster Kombat	300M+ total players	Profitability claimed; revenue undisclosed	Enormous distribution, unclear revenue per user
Тюряга	≈168K current monthly users	#2 current grossing rank	A small audience can monetize heavily
Telescope	≈1.6M current monthly users	#6 current grossing rank	A larger audience does not automatically earn more

Did tap-to-earn stop being the best Telegram Mini App model?

Tap-to-earn has largely lost its position as Telegram's most convincing Mini App business model because the current grossing leaders are finding ways to make users spend before any future token reward arrives.

The 2024 wave was extraordinary for acquisition. Hamster Kombat exceeded 300 million total players. Major reached 70 million users. TapSwap also claimed tens of millions.

The weak point appeared after the airdrops. Large parts of those audiences had joined because they expected tokens rather than because they loved the underlying products. Once tokens were distributed, usage often fell hard.

Major's current Telegram audience of around 125,000 is one particularly stark example. Catizen's bot now sits around 83,000 monthly users despite its huge historical player count. Those businesses may still operate elsewhere, but the original Telegram engagement did not persist at anything close to peak levels.

Today's grossing table looks much less dependent on that formula. Gift-case apps charge Stars immediately. Social games sell entertainment and rewards. AI tools charge for useful output. Subscription functionality gives utility apps a way to collect recurring payments.

Tap-to-earn can still be a powerful growth mechanic. The market has simply learned that millions of reward hunters are less valuable than a much smaller group that actually enjoys spending money inside the product.

Have Telegram Stars changed how much Mini Apps can make?

Telegram Stars have changed Mini App economics in a meaningful way because developers can now turn a Telegram user into a paying customer without sending that person through an external checkout.

Telegram requires digital goods and services sold inside bots and Mini Apps to use Stars. Users can buy Stars through Telegram and then spend them directly inside games, AI tools, subscriptions and other digital products.

Catizen showed how quickly this became material. During one three-month period, the company said about $8.8 million of its Mini App Center revenue came through Stars.

Telegram has expanded Stars since then. Mini Apps can now sell recurring subscriptions with different tiers. Developers can also use Stars for gifts and other platform features. Telegram's current documentation says more than 500 million of its users interact with Mini Apps each month.

The checkout itself is unusually simple. Telegram says users purchasing digital goods do not need to enter information such as their full name, postal address or card details during each purchase.

That removes a large piece of friction for impulse purchases such as game items, AI credits or digital gifts.

Stars did not create Catizen, Boinkers or the current gift craze by themselves. They gave developers a much cleaner way to collect money once demand already existed.

Are Telegram Mini Apps becoming a real app economy now?

Telegram Mini Apps now look much more like an emerging app economy than a temporary collection of crypto games.

Telegram says more than 500 million users interact with Mini Apps monthly. Its Bot Platform hosts more than 10 million bots, and the company has continued adding features long after the first gaming boom ended.

The current developer stack includes seamless Telegram identity, Stars payments, subscriptions, advertising, full-screen apps, home-screen shortcuts, persistent device storage, orientation controls, accelerometer access and richer sharing inside chats. Telegram's June 2026 Mini App documentation was still receiving new API additions.

What developers are building has changed alongside those tools.

Gift and case apps currently dominate several top grossing positions. Telescope brings social discovery into Telegram. AI assistants sell access to external models. Games continue to monetize. Financial services and wallets use Telegram as a customer-acquisition and transaction layer.

Telegram is still far from something like WeChat, where Mini Programs cover a huge part of daily commerce and local services. Telegram's public revenue data is also much weaker than what developers can see privately.

But the commercial question has moved on. We no longer have to ask whether anyone will ever pay inside a Telegram Mini App. Tens of millions of dollars have already answered that.

So which Telegram Mini Apps are making real money now?

The clearest money-makers today are a mix of proven multimillion-dollar businesses and newer grossing leaders: Catizen and GAMEE have the strongest disclosed financial evidence, while Epic Gift, Тюряга, Boinkers, Random Games, Gorilla Case and a large AI Mini App are among the apps attracting the most spending right now.

Catizen remains the benchmark for direct consumer monetization, with roughly $35 million reported in 2024 and 1.2 million paying users. Its Telegram audience is far smaller now, so we treat that figure as proof of what the platform can produce rather than as Catizen's current run rate.

GAMEE gives us fresher financial evidence. The business reported approximately $3.5 million in 2025 revenue and $926,000 in the first quarter of 2026, with revenue still growing year over year.

Major and Memhash also belong among the genuine success stories. Major exceeded $10 million in its first five months, while Memhash reportedly generated $500,000 in ten days. Their strongest numbers came during much hotter launch periods, so they tell us more about Telegram's ability to create monetization spikes than about today's leaders.

For current spending, FindMini's daily table is more useful. Epic Gift currently leads it. Тюряга, Boinkers, Random Games and Gorilla Case follow. Five of the top ten products are closely tied to games, digital gifts, cases or paid reward mechanics. An AI service with 2.4 million monthly users is also inside the top ten.

The big change is visible here. Telegram's first Mini App boom was built around giving users a reason to expect money later. These days, more of the successful apps give users a reason to spend money now.

That produces smaller headline audiences in some cases, but the underlying business can be much better. A Mini App with 200,000 users who buy Stars every week may be worth more than one with 20 million people waiting for an airdrop.

So yes: real Telegram Mini App businesses already exist, several have generated millions or tens of millions of dollars, and the current market is broader than the crypto-clicker boom that created it. The harder part is identifying the exact number-one earner, because private revenue remains largely hidden.

What we can identify with much more confidence is where the money is going today: digital gifts and case games first, social games close behind, then AI and other paid utilities, with advertising and financial services adding another layer that public grossing tables do not fully capture.