Most overpayments for a Telegram bot are not born in the code, but at the very beginning - at the stage when the task is described in one line “need a bot for business.” A good technical specification for a Telegram bot is not bureaucracy, but a tool that protects your budget: it turns the vague “I want it like a competitor” into a specific list of works with a fixed price. We have been developing bots for more than three years, the studio has 17+ bots in production, and on almost every first call we see the same thing: the more accurately the customer describes the task, the more accurate the estimate and the fewer surprises in the invoice. This article contains what must be included in the technical specifications, a ready-made checklist and a real example from a case.
Why do you need technical specifications for a Telegram bot?
Terms of reference is an agreement on what exactly you are buying. Without it, both the customer and the developer have different bots in their heads: you think about “a bot that guides the client to payment,” and the contractor thought about “a bot with a menu and a button to write to the manager.” The difference in money is multiple. The technical specification covers three risks at once:
- Risk of overpayment. When the task is vague, the price has to be set with a margin “just in case.” A clear technical specification removes this margin.
- Risk of underpayment-surprise. The downside: you expected 15 thousand, but it turned out that you need payment and CRM - this is another fork. It's better to find out before the start, not halfway through.
- The risk of “doing the wrong thing.” If the volume is not fixed, the dispute “was this included or not” is inevitable. TK is something that can be referred to by both parties.
Important: you don’t need to write a formal technical specification with diagrams - that’s our job. You need a clear, human description of the task. Based on it, we collect a structured technical specification and a fixed estimate in 1–2 days. This article is about how to give such a description so that the price is accurate.
6 blocks, without which the technical specification is incomplete
Any working technical specification for a Telegram bot rests on six blocks. Go through them before requesting an estimate - it will save both time and money.
1. Purpose and result
The most important and most often overlooked block. Not “a bot is needed”, but “a bot must accept orders for delivery and calculate the cost at the address” or “a bot sells access to the course and closes it when the subscription ends.” Describe what counts as success: what the user must do and what should happen as a result. The goal cuts off half of the unnecessary functionality before the estimate.
2. User roles and scenarios
A bot almost always has more than one type of user: client, administrator, sometimes courier, partner or moderator. For each, describe what it does. “The client selects the product, pays, and receives a tracking number. The admin sees orders, changes statuses, sends out mailings.” The number of roles and branches of the script is a direct multiplier to the estimate, because each branch is a separate logic.
3. Payment: is it necessary or not?
If the bot accepts money, this is immediately a different class of task. Specify: what methods (payment gateway, bank transfers, CryptoPay, digital wallet), whether checks are needed under applicable local rules, whether there is a subscription with auto-debit or are these one-time payments. Payment integration is the most critical block: you can’t make mistakes here, the client’s money is at stake. Therefore, it significantly affects the price and term.
4. Integrations and external systems
Where the bot should “reach”: CRM (CRM, CRM), Google Sheets, ERP, website, external API, parsing something. Each integration is a separate work with authorization, webhooks and error handling, and not a “tick box”. List all systems with which the bot should exchange data, and in which direction: the bot writes to the CRM, the CRM responds to the bot, or both.
5. Interface: regular bot or Mini App
An ordinary bot communicates with messages and inline buttons - it’s fast and cheap. Telegram Mini App is a full-fledged web application inside the messenger (catalogue, shopping cart, map of seats in the hall), requires design and front-end and costs several times more. Decide honestly: do you really need Mini App or are buttons enough? If in doubt, we explained the difference in the article about how much does Telegram Mini App cost?.
6. Non-functional requirements
Something that is not visible to the user, but determines whether the bot will survive for months or fall on the first hundred people: where to host it, whether monitoring and backups are needed, what the expected load is, and - critically - who owns the source code. We have monitoring, backups and error handling of the Telegram API included in every bot by default, and we provide the source code to your git repository from day one. Write this down explicitly in the technical specifications - otherwise you risk getting a vendor lock-in.
Rule: 80% of the cost and risk is created not by the “bot as such”, but by payment, integrations and infrastructure. It is these three blocks that are most often missed in the description - and it is because of them that the estimate then “suddenly” increases.
Checklist: questions to answer before requesting an estimate
If you want to get an accurate price the first time, answer these questions in writing and send along with your request. This is the skeleton of your technical specification:
- What should a bot do in one sentence? What is considered a result?
- Who uses it (client, admin, someone else) and what does each person do?
- Is payment required? What are the methods and are receipts/signatures needed?
- What systems should I integrate with (CRM, spreadsheets, API, website)?
- Do I need an admin panel and what actions are there in it?
- A regular bot with buttons or a Mini App with an interface?
- Do you have texts, a logo, a corporate identity - or do you need to start from scratch?
- Where will the bot live (your server / needs to be selected)?
- Who owns the source code after delivery?
- Is there a deadline and budget fork?
It’s okay if some of the questions have not yet been answered - this is the reason for the brief. But even half the answers dramatically improve the accuracy of the estimate.
How the volume of technical specifications turns into an estimate
To make the connection between “what is written in the technical specification” and “how much it costs” clear, here is a guideline for forks. The starting prices are real - these are the lower limits from which the final estimate for your task is calculated.
| What's in the technical specifications | Bot type | Price from | Deadline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menu, FAQ, requests in Telegram, no payment | Starter | Quote on request | 5–7 days |
| Database, payment, admin, 1 integration | Business bot | Quote on request | 10–14 days |
| Mini App, AI, multi-CRM, custom APIs | Turnkey | Quote on request | 3–5 weeks |
| Full product: load, scale | Mini App/Product | Quote on request | 3–5 weeks |
A pattern can be seen: each line down is a new block in the technical specification (first payment, then integration, then Mini App). Therefore, the “extra” item in the technical specification is not just a paragraph of text, but real money. A full analysis of pricing is in the article how much does it cost to develop a Telegram bot?.
Where in technical specifications are they most often overpaid?
Over the years, we have compiled a list of items that customers ask for “just in case” and then don’t use. If they are in your technical specification, double-check whether they are needed at the start:
- Mini App where there would be enough buttons. The most common overpayment. A catalog of 10 items lives perfectly on inline buttons.
- All payment methods at once. Often, at the start, one is enough (payment gateway or CryptoPay), the rest is added later when there is demand.
- AI “so that it is”. GPT/Claude costs money both to develop and to operate. If the problem is solved using ready-made scripts, AI is not needed.
- Complex analytics before the first sales. First, check what the bot actually sells, then build dashboards.
- Multilingualism without an audience. Second language means doubling texts and testing. Add when foreign clients actually appear.
A healthy approach is to assemble a minimum working version (MVP) in 5–7 days, launch and expand based on demand. We described how this works in the material about launch of an MVP Telegram bot in a week.
Real example: Technical specification for a lead bot with CRM
Using a specific case, we will show how a task description turns into a scope of work. One of our projects - Telegram bot for collecting leads with CRM integration. The client’s initial pain sounded simple: “leads from Telegram are lost between chat and CRM, it is unclear where the application came from.”
If this remained the entire TK, the bot would be “accepting requests in the chat” for the lower fork. But when we divided the task into the same six blocks, the real amount of work emerged, which formed the estimate:
- Goal: Each lead automatically and without manual transfer gets to the desired stage of the CRM funnel.
- Integration: two-way chat Telegram ↔ CRM - the manager responds from CRM, the client sees the message in the bot, and vice versa.
- Data: A UTM source is attached to each transaction so that it is clear which advertisement led to the request.
- Scenario: an auto funnel of 7 messages that warms up the lead if the manager does not respond immediately.
It is these four points - and not the “bot for applications” - that are the real technical specifications. Each of them adds work with the CRM API, webhook processing and synchronization logic. But the result is transparent: zero manual transfer of applications and a clear source of each lead. This is the meaning of a good technical specification - it makes visible what money is actually being paid for, even before the start of development.
What happens after you send a description
To make it clear how your human description turns into a fixed price, here's our process:
- Brief (30 minutes). We ask the right questions in six blocks and cut off the unnecessary ones. For free.
- Technical specifications and estimates (1–2 days). We draw up a structured technical specification, a fixed price and a period in days.
- Agreement and staged payment. Volume and price are fixed, payment in stages or through a secure transaction.
- Development with demo every 2-3 days. You compare the result with the technical specifications live, and not “in a month.”
The price in the contract does not increase as the project progresses - this is the meaning of a fixed estimate based on technical specifications. And to keep deadlines realistic, we take on a limited number of projects at a time. If you want to estimate the price right now, you can do this at page with tariffs and calculator.
FAQ: frequently asked questions about technical specifications for a bot
Do I need to compose technical specifications for a Telegram bot myself?
Formal technical specifications - no, this is our job. You need a clear description of the task: what the bot does, who uses it, whether payment and integration is needed, what is considered the result. Based on it, we draw up a structured technical specification and a fixed estimate within 1–2 days.
What must be included in the technical specification for a Telegram bot?
Six blocks: goal and result, user roles and scenarios, payment (and what methods), list of integrations, interface type (bot or Mini App) and non-functional requirements - hosting, monitoring, backups and source ownership.
How does technical specification affect the cost of bot development?
Directly. Every scenario, integration and payment method is a lot of work. A vague technical specification forces you to reserve for the unknown, and the price rises. A clear technical specification allows you to give an exact fixed price in the contract and not pay for “misunderstood”.
What should I do if I don’t know what functionality I need?
This is normal and occurs most often. There is a free 30-minute brief for this: we ask the right questions, cut out the unnecessary and help you put together a minimal working MVP that can be launched in 5-7 days and expanded later.
Is it possible to change technical specifications during the development process?
Minor edits within the agreed scope are included in the work and are visible on the demo every 2-3 days. Significant new functions are packaged separately as improvements with an understandable price. This is why technical specifications are needed - it fixes what is included in the estimate and what is beyond its scope.