How it works: guides
What it takes for a mini app to work: the bot and its menu button, taking payments, publishing to MAX, data from tables and a custom domain. No generalities — how it actually works here.
The builder’s handbook63 articles, 23 video lessons and eight animated explanations — inside the builder, and open without an account. The guides here answer “should I”; the handbook answers “which button”.Open the handbook →- How to create a Telegram mini app without a developerA mini app is an interface that opens inside Telegram itself: nothing to download, nothing to install, launched from a chat by a button in the bot menu. Here is what it takes, in what order, and where people usually trip.Read the guide →
- What a Telegram mini app is, and how it differs from a botA Telegram mini app (Telegram Mini App) is a web page the messenger opens inside itself, over a chat: from a button in a bot’s menu, from a button under a message, or by a link. Nothing is installed, and Telegram itself tells the app who opened it — so there is no sign-up and no password either. Here is what it looks like, how it differs from a bot and from a website, and where one is really worth having.Read the guide →
- How to create a Telegram mini app from your phoneYou do not need a computer. The builder’s editor opens in a phone browser and works there in full: screens, blocks, data tables, publishing. The bot is created inside Telegram itself, with @BotFather. Here is the order of things, and how building on a phone differs from building at a desk.Read the guide →
- Telegram mini app examples: 16 ready templatesBelow are sixteen examples of mini apps for Telegram and MAX. They are the builder’s templates rather than somebody else’s projects: each opens in the editor assembled and working — every screen has a way in, buttons lead where they should, and a chosen specialist, date or seat category travels with the request. Any of them can be opened, looked at from the inside and used as the base for your own. Links to the template pages follow the text.Read the guide →
- How to create a store in Telegram: step by step, no developerAn online store in Telegram is easiest to build as a mini app: the catalogue, cart and checkout open from a button in your bot’s menu, a card payment opens the till’s payment page — YooKassa or T-Bank — and then returns the buyer to the app, and the order reaches your Telegram. Here is how to create such a store from a template, where its products come from, how payment is connected and what it costs.Read the guide →
- How to add a web app to a Telegram bot as a menu buttonWeb App is what Telegram’s API calls the thing its interface calls a mini app. It is added to a bot as an Open button in the menu, and that button is what separates a mini app from a link somebody has to be sent. Here is where it comes from, what it takes, and why it sometimes points at the wrong place.Read the guide →
- How to take card payments in a mini appPayment inside a mini app goes through your own merchant account: YooKassa or T-Bank. The money reaches you directly and we are not part of the settlement at all. Here is what that means in practice.Read the guide →
- How to make a mini app in MAX: building, publishing and moderationA mini app in MAX is a set of screens that opens from a chat with a bot: a catalogue, a booking, a request form. It is assembled here exactly as for Telegram, and it is the same project — there is no separate MAX version. Two things differ: the app’s address is pasted by hand into the MAX partner cabinet, and only companies, sole traders and self-employed people resident in Russia may publish there.Read the guide →
- Where a mini app gets its data: tables and external sourcesLists in an app — products, services, a timetable, listings — are drawn from data rather than from layout. Here is where that data lives, who changes it, and what to do when you would rather keep it yourself.Read the guide →
- A custom domain for a mini app: how it worksOn the Pro and Studio plans an app can open at your own domain. Here is what it takes, what happens to the certificate, and what a custom domain will not do.Read the guide →
- Chatting with customers inside a Telegram mini appA question about a size, a detail for a booking, a request to call back — people find it easier to write where they are already choosing. The Chat block puts a conversation right into the app, so it does not drift into a manager’s private messages where nobody finds it later.Read the guide →
- Connecting a mini app to n8n, Make, Zapier and your own serverAn order from the app often has to travel on: into a CRM, an accounting sheet, a warehouse chat. The builder has no ready connectors to particular systems — it has webhooks both ways instead. Every automation service and every script understands them, because they are plain HTTP.Read the guide →