Bot or mini app: taking bookings and orders in Telegram
A bot talks to customers in the chat, while a mini app opens a full interface inside Telegram. How they differ, what they cost and when you need both.
Customers message you on Telegram, but the only way to book or place an order is by phone. Requests sit in staff members’ personal chats, and some of them inevitably slip through. This is one of the most common problems people bring to us. The fix is a bot or a mini app, and the difference between the two matters more than it seems.
What a bot can do
A bot talks to the customer in the chat, with messages and buttons. It takes a request, answers common questions, sends appointment reminders and pings the admin the moment something new comes in. For short scenarios it’s the quickest and cheapest option. A bot starts at $600, which covers the conversation flow and notifications to the admin.
Where a bot struggles is choice. When there are lots of options, the chat turns into an endless column of buttons. Picking a doctor out of twenty, finding a free slot next week or putting together an order from a catalogue is awkward in a conversation. People get tired of scrolling and pick up the phone instead.
When you need a mini app
A mini app opens a proper interface inside Telegram: a catalogue with photos, a calendar of free slots, a map, a cart. There’s nothing to install, since it opens from a button right in the chat, and there’s no app store review either.
To the customer it feels like a small app. For the business it costs far less than a real one. A mini app starts at $1,600.
Why you often need both
Simple steps are easy in a chat, while choosing is easier on a screen. That’s why in most projects the bot and the mini app work together. Take a clinic. The patient picks a specialty in the chat, browses doctors and free times in the mini app, and the confirmation and reminder come back to the chat. That’s how our concept project Pulse works, and you can try it yourself in the Work section.
What to think through before launch
Who gets the notifications, and what happens if nobody replies? A request has to go somewhere next, or within a week people will ignore the bot the same way they used to ignore the personal chats.
Where do requests live? You need a panel, a spreadsheet or a CRM connection that shows every request and its status. A Telegram chat history won’t do that job.
Who owns the bot and the server? The bot token, the owner account and the server should belong to your company. Then you can change developers without losing your customers or their history.
Do you need payments? You can take money through Telegram Payments or a local payment provider. It’s set up separately, so decide early and build it into the flow.
One last thing: a bot won’t replace your manager. It takes care of routine questions and hands the tricky cases to a person, along with the whole conversation.
Where to start
Write down, in three or four steps, what the customer needs to do, from the first message to the confirmation. From that we build a prototype you can click through in Telegram before development starts. It quickly shows where the chat is enough and where you need a mini app. You’ll have a test bot in your hands within the first week.
