No honest single figure exists. Anyone quoting one is either selling something or describing their own niche. What can be pinned down is the structure — and that is more useful than any average.
The formula that means something
Total spend divided by the number of subscribers who arrived and stayed. Three places where people fool themselves:
- Counting clicks, not subscriptions. A click costs nothing and means nothing: somebody looked and left.
- Counting on the day of the post. A share of arrivals leaves within the week. The real figure is visible seven days later, not before.
- Not counting your own time. If you spend two hours a day in comments, those subscribers are not free — you are simply paying in something other than money.
What moves the number
The niche
The more a customer is worth, the more a subscriber costs. In finance and crypto you are bidding against people whose deals are worth thousands. In hobbies and narrow professional topics, the order of magnitude is different because fewer people want the same attention.
The quality of the placement
An inflated channel returns zero at any price, which is why checking beats haggling — see how to spot a fake channel.
Audience overlap
A placement in a large adjacent-topic channel is almost always more expensive per subscriber than a small channel that is exactly your topic. Wider reach, worse fit.
The creative
The same budget in the same channel produces different results depending on the text. The spread here is larger than the spread between placements — and it is the one factor entirely in your hands.
Where people land
If they click through to a channel with no description and three posts, they will not subscribe no matter what you paid for the click. Channel presentation moves cost per subscriber more than choice of placement does.
Why free sources change the arithmetic
Comments and chats cost no money and a lot of time. Counting them honestly means putting a price on your hour. But they have a property paid traffic does not: they do not stop when the budget does. A channel you built by hand keeps working in the month with no ad spend.
The practical conclusion is usually the same one: automating a free source is worth more than increasing the ad budget. An hour costs the same either way, and under automation the number of channels you can be present in stops being limited by that hour.
Measuring it on your own site
- Create a separate invite link per source. Telegram supports several and reports on each.
- Record spend: money paid and hours worked.
- Look at subscriber counts a week after, not on the day.
- Divide. That number is yours, and it beats any industry average.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.