Telegram was planning to establish a premium layer, the company’s founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, has said, revealing this was indeed the case as rumours began to circulate on the Internet last month.

According to ANI, Telegram Premium, as it will be called, will be available by the end of the month.

Before you get too worked up, keep in mind that all of the present free features will continue to be available. Not only that, but new features will be added to the free tier in the future.

Telegram Premium would give “everyone” access to “extra features, speed, and resources,” according to Durov.

It would also “enable users to show their support for Telegram by joining the club that gets new features first”.

Even users who do not pay for Telegram Premium will be able to benefit indirectly from some of its features, such as viewing extra-large documents, media, and stickers provided by Premium users, or tapping to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to reply in the same way.

Durov concludes his announcement, which he dutifully posted on Telegram, by revealing that the company’s ad experiments in public channels have been more successful than expected, but even so, he believes the service should be primarily funded by its users, rather than advertisers, to ensure that users remain the service’s top priority moving forward.