A Telegram bot for an online school or tutor

What can a Telegram bot do for an online school?

It can take over the routine around your classes: selling seats, collecting payment, counting lessons and reminding the people who forgot to pay. A Telegram bot for an online school is a chat in Telegram that students open like any other conversation. They find a group, pay and get into the group chat with buttons, and you run the schedule, the students and the money from a panel in the same bot.

We built one for an English teacher who runs nine small groups of up to four students, on different days of the week. In the Speakwell English case (the client’s details are changed), the work before the bot looked like this: sell the free seats, collect payment before each class, note who came, remind whoever forgot to pay and offer a freed seat to the next person in line. Done by hand in chats, that is a second job on top of teaching.

More people are learning online. In 2024, 33% of internet users in the EU did an online course or used online learning material in the three months before the survey, up from 30% in 2023, according to Eurostat. For a teacher, each new student is one more payment to check and one more seat to keep count of.

What does a student see in the bot?

A student sees a short path from the first message to a seat in a group. They open the bot, choose group classes and get a list of every group with its level, day, time and the number of seats left. A tap on a group opens its card with the day, the time and the date of the next class.

From the card the student goes to payment. The bot asks for a promo code if they have one, then offers one class or a package of four. The package is offered only when the group has four classes ahead.

While the student pays, the seat is held for them for 15 minutes, so two people can’t buy the last seat at once. If a payment is started and not finished, the bot sends one reminder after 10 minutes. Once the money is in, the student gets a personal invite to the group’s private chat. If someone else joins through that link, the bot cancels it and sends the student a new one, so a forwarded link doesn’t let a stranger into the class.

Two more paths matter for a school. A new student who doesn’t know their level can send a voice message for a free level check, and the teacher replies with the level, so the student picks the right group. And when a group is full, the student taps a button to hear about a new seat. The waiting list is kept by level, not by group, so a seat that frees up in any B1 group reaches everyone waiting for B1.

Which rules does the bot run on its own?

The bot runs the rules that start on a clock rather than with a tap: closing classes, charging lessons, reminding about payment and freeing seats. Nobody has to remember them.

Closing a class. When two hours have passed since a class started, the bot closes it and takes one lesson off every paid seat. Then it asks the teacher whether the class took place, with three answers: everyone was there, not everyone was there, or the class didn’t happen. By default the lesson is charged. Under each student’s name the teacher can tap “Keep lesson” for someone who missed the class for a good reason, and “the class didn’t happen” gives the lesson back to everyone.

The lesson balance. Every student has a balance of lessons in each group, and every change to it has a reason the teacher can see: a payment, a refund, a class, an absence with a good reason, a class that didn’t happen, or a manual correction, which always needs a comment.

Reminders. When a student has no lessons left after a class, they get 72 hours to pay for the next one. The bot reminds them at 72, 48, 12 and 2 hours before the deadline, in the same chat where they paid.

Freeing a seat. If the deadline passes without payment, the seat goes back on sale, the student leaves the group chat, the teacher gets a notice, and everyone on the waiting list for that level hears that a seat is free. The teacher doesn’t have to chase anyone for money or remove anyone from the chat by hand.

One rule changed before launch, and it is worth thinking about if your groups meet on different days. The first plan had one weekly payment day for everyone. With nine groups spread across the week, that gave one group four days between its class and the request to pay, and another only a few hours. So each group got its own payment cycle, tied to its own class.

How is a bot different from chats and a spreadsheet?

The difference is who does the routine: with chats and a spreadsheet it is you, every week, and in a bot the rules run by themselves. Here is the same school week done both ways.

A spreadsheet can hold the same data, but it doesn’t act on it: it won’t send a reminder 2 hours before a deadline or take someone out of a group chat. If you have a couple of groups and everyone pays on time, a spreadsheet may be enough. With several groups on different days, the reminders and the counting add up to that second job.

What does the teacher run from the panel in the bot?

The teacher runs the school from the same bot the students use, so there is no separate website to log in to. The panel opens with one command and holds requests, groups, level checks, statistics, promo codes and the bot’s texts.

In groups the teacher sets the price, the number of seats, the day and the time, sends a finished group to the archive and sees each student’s lesson balance with the history behind it. Requests for one-to-one lessons arrive in the panel, and new students’ voice messages wait in level checks until the teacher answers. The bot’s texts can be changed from the panel without asking a developer, and a student’s data can be deleted from there too.

A school that already has students doesn’t start from zero. Before launch, current students got a button in their group chat, and one tap brought each of them into the bot already linked to their group. Later the bot learned to handle a student in several groups at once, each group with its own balance and payment deadline, and a move to another group carries the remaining lessons along.

Which schools is it for, and where does a bot stop?

This setup fits a tutor or a small school that sells seats in groups on a schedule and wants students to pay per class or in packages. It fits especially well when your groups already talk in Telegram group chats, because the bot hands out access to those chats itself.

A bot stops where Telegram stops. If your students aren’t on Telegram, a bot won’t reach them, and our article on a bot or an app goes through that choice. And everything in this article happens around the class: seats, money, lessons on the balance, reminders. The class itself is the teacher’s.

You also don’t need everything on day one. The Speakwell English bot kept growing after launch: students could join several groups from 23 August, and in October we went over it again so that no payment or access to a group chat gets lost in unusual cases. A first version can take the one job that eats most of your week now.

How much does a bot for a school cost, and how long does it take?

Our Telegram bots start from $100 and take from 3 days. The Speakwell English bot, with payments, lesson balances, reminders and the teacher’s panel, went live five days after work began: the design started on 10 August 2026, and the bot launched on 15 August.

The final price depends on what the bot has to do: how many scenarios it has, whether it takes payments, where the admin panel lives, integrations and languages. Our article on what a Telegram bot costs uses this same school bot as one of its two examples.

The first call and the written scope are free. We name the price once the work is agreed and counted; it is fixed before work starts and changes only if the scope changes. You click through a working prototype before the bulk of the work, and the person who scopes your bot also builds it. We work remotely from Batumi, Georgia, in English or Russian.

Questions

Sources

1. Eurostat: More internet users turn to online learning in 2024 (news, 24 January 2025)

Alexander ZabrodinCEO · Founder

ZabSoft is a software company in Batumi. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it.