This is a founder's note rather than a how-to, so it'll be shorter than the other posts and read a little differently. If you came here looking for a tutorial, the member export guide is the one you want. If you came here wondering why a piece of software exists, keep reading.
The problem I kept hitting
I run two Telegram communities — one for a side project, one for a hobby. Both are well past the size where you can keep track of members in your head. Every quarter or so I'd want to do something simple: see how many members had joined in the last month, segment them by some criterion, sync a list to a CRM.
Every quarter, that simple thing took me an afternoon.
The path was always the same: log into Telegram Desktop, run the export, wait an hour, get a giant HTML file or a JSON I'd have to parse, write a one-off Python script to extract the slice I actually wanted, fight with rate limits, finally get the CSV. By the time I had the data, I'd lost the thread of what I'd been trying to learn from it.
The third or fourth time I did this, I started writing a more general script — something I could re-run with different parameters instead of rewriting from scratch. The fifth time, the script had grown a little CLI. The sixth time, I started thinking about putting a UI on it, because I was tired of remembering flag names.
That's when I noticed: I was building this thing anyway. The cost of polishing it slightly more and giving it to other people was small, and the people I'd talked to in those communities had the same problem.
What I tried first that didn't work
A couple of dead ends along the way:
A SaaS web app. This was my first instinct because it's what everyone builds these days. I got about two weekends in before I realized the architecture was wrong. To pull data on someone's behalf, the app would need their Telegram session credentials on my server. Which means I'd need to be the kind of person you'd trust with your Telegram session credentials, which is a much higher bar than "wrote a useful tool." It also meant a hosting bill, a security posture, an incident-response plan — all to solve a problem that didn't actually need a server.
A desktop app. Better on the trust dimension, worse on distribution. People don't install desktop apps for one-off tasks. The friction of "download installer, click through warnings, launch app, log into Telegram inside the app" turned out to be roughly the same as the friction of "run a Python script."
A bot. I built a prototype bot, then re-discovered the limit I covered in the API vs extension comparison — bots can only see chats they're in, and only from when they joined onward. Useless for the historical pulls that were the whole point.
The browser extension was the fourth thing I tried. It worked on the first weekend.
Why the extension was the right shape
The shape of the problem turned out to be: I have a Telegram Web tab open, I want a CSV out of it. The tool that runs inside that tab, reading the structured data behind it with the session that's already authenticated — that's the right tool. It took a couple more versions to follow that all the way through and delete the credential setup I'd bolted on beside it, but the shape was right from the start.
A few specific things fell into place that I hadn't anticipated:
- Trust by architecture. No server in the data path. No session credentials leaving the user's machine. The pitch becomes "look at the source, see for yourself" instead of "trust me."
- Distribution by browser store. One-click install, automatic updates, the platform handles the security review.
- The mental model matches. Users already think of Telegram Web as where the data is. The extension lives in that same surface, doesn't ask them to context-switch to a separate app or website.
The closest analogy I can think of is what extensions did for video downloads from streaming sites a decade ago. The job was always doable — there was an API, there were scripts — but extensions made it a click. Mastros is doing the same thing for Telegram exports.
What I want it to be (and not be)
Mastros is not trying to be a Telegram analytics platform. It's not trying to be a CRM. It's not trying to be a community management suite.
It's trying to be the thing you reach for when the answer to "where did the data go?" is "into Telegram, and now you need it out." That's a narrow job. I'd rather do it well than expand into adjacent jobs that other tools already do well (Combot for moderation, TGStat for analytics, your CRM for outreach).
The roadmap is shaped by that. We're not adding a charting view. We're not adding a moderation surface. We are improving the export — more granularity, more fields, better integration with the tools downstream.
If that sounds like a bet against scope, it is. The bet is that there are enough people with the same problem I had — afternoon-eating data extraction — that a tool which solves only that problem can be a real thing.
What I've learned from the first cohort of users
A few patterns from the first few thousand installs:
- Most exports are small. Median export size is a few thousand messages. The 10K-member groups are the visible use case; the 500-member groups are the silent majority.
- People reuse the same chat. Most users export from the same one or two chats over and over. The "backup" use case is more common than the "research" use case.
- CSV beats JSON, by a lot. I shipped JSON first because it preserves more structure. Almost everyone wants CSV.
- Compliance buyers exist. I didn't build for compliance and was surprised how often it came up in early conversations. That shaped the compliance archiving piece and is part of why the Scale tier looks the way it does.
What I haven't seen in the data: anyone using exports for something I'd consider sketchy. Marketing-spam targeting was the use case I worried about, and it just hasn't materialized — partly because Telegram itself does a good job punishing it, partly because the legitimate use cases (community ops, research, compliance) are larger than I'd estimated.
What's next
The current focus is making exports faster on large groups and adding scheduled-export support without requiring a server. The latter is genuinely hard from a browser-extension architecture; we're working on it.
If you've got a use case that doesn't fit cleanly into anything covered in our other articles, I want to hear about it. The early users have shaped the product more than the original spec did. — Marcus
Want to see what we ship next? New guides and product updates land on the Mastros blog. Low volume, no marketing fluff.
Related reading
- How to Export Telegram Group Members to CSV — the tutorial this whole thing was built to make a one-click job.
- Telegram API vs Browser Extension — more on why the extension model won.
- How to Archive Telegram Messages for Compliance — the surprise use case from the first cohort.