Encrypted chat app Telegram recently released the following announcement:

Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled. And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone.

After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That's why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first. Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don't subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way. While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority.

My suggestion:

If you are a Telegram user (or even if you are not a Telegram user), and if you don't want to pay fees in order to exchange encrypted text messages, take a look at the always-free app, called Signal, at https://signal.org/en/.

All text messages sent with Signal are encrypted. The primary disadvantage with Signal is that both the sender and the receiver of text messages must be using Signal.

I have been using Signal for a couple of years now and love it. Best of all, your encrypted text messages on Signal cannot be monitored by Facebook (now called Meta), Google, Yahoo, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or any other hackers.