Q: How are you going to make money out of this?
We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.
Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be an end-goal for Telegram.
https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-out-of-this