recipe

Telegram bot with Postgres and a daily digest

A Telegram bot that saves what it hears to Postgres and answers, plus a scheduled job that sends each chat a daily summary. About $20.59 a month.

$20.59 a monthchecked 22 October 2026the code as markdown

What you build

how it fits together

The bot long-polls Telegram, so it needs no public address. The digest is the same image started with MODE=digest.

Before you start

You need a bot token from @BotFather. The agent asks you for it and keeps it out of the repository.

What Gagarin creates

Name	Kind	Size	Holds
`db`	postgres	s, 1 GB disk	the messages
`telegram`	external	none	`TELEGRAM_TOKEN`
`bot`	service	s	the bot, private
`digest`	scheduled job	s	`0 7 * * *` UTC

The commands

Run from this directory, with Docker running.

gg init tgbot
gg resource add tgbot/db postgres --storage 1
gg resource add tgbot/telegram external --env-file .env.telegram
gg build tgbot/bot:v1 --push
gg deploy tgbot/bot:8080 bot:v1 --deps db --deps telegram
gg run tgbot/digest bot:v1 --schedule "0 7 * * *" --env MODE=digest --deps db --deps telegram
gg status tgbot

.env.telegram holds one line, TOKEN=<your token>, and Gagarin publishes it as TELEGRAM_TOKEN. Add it to .gitignore before you write it.

What it costs

About $20.59 a month: two size-s containers at $10.22 each and 1 GB of disk at $0.15. The digest runs for a few seconds a day, under a cent a month. Traffic is free. Rates: https://gagarin.cloud/pricing

What can go wrong

gg build fails before it starts: Docker is not running. docker info says.
The bot logs polling: Unauthorized: the token is wrong. Restate the external with the right one: gg resource rotate tgbot/telegram --env-file .env.telegram.
The digest never arrives: gg status tgbot shows each firing and how it ended, and gg logs tgbot/digest shows what it printed.
Times are UTC. Add --tz Europe/Berlin (or your zone) to the gg run line.

Run it locally

cp .env.example .env    # put the token in it
docker compose up --build
docker compose run --rm digest

Clean up

gg destroy tgbot

Gagarin emails the project owner a button to approve the deletion.