I built TgCloud: An open-source image hosting & CDN powered by Telegram storage (written in Go)

adrien — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:45:35 +0000

Hi everyone! 👋

I'm a beginner developer, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning Go by building side projects. Like many of you, I love creating apps, but I absolutely hate getting AWS S3 bills or dealing with rate-limited public APIs just for basic image storage.

That led me to a simple, slightly crazy question:

Can Telegram be used as a reliable, zero-cost image hosting backend?

To find out, I built TgCloud.

Ideal for Small Projects (Not for Production!)

⚠️ Let's be clear from the start: This project is absolutely not intended to be used in production environments or for large commercial projects.

However, it is the perfect, lightweight, and free tool for:

Hosting images for your personal developer portfolio.
Powering your small side-projects or MVPs without putting down a credit card.
Storing your own desktop screenshots or mockups on a budget.

What is TgCloud?

TgCloud is a self-hosted, lightweight image hosting service and CDN wrapper written in Go. It allows you to upload images via an API, a remote URL, or a clean drag-and-drop web UI.

The magic part? It requires absolutely no database.

Quick Links

Live Demo: adrienmttn.github.io/TgCloud/
GitHub Repository: AdrienMttn/TgCloud
(If you like the idea, a ⭐️ on GitHub would mean the world to a beginner like me!)

How It Works

The architecture is designed to be as stateless and lightweight as possible:

Upload: You POST your image (file or remote URL) to the TgCloud binary.
Stream & Store: TgCloud securely streams it to your private Telegram channel using the native Telegram Bot API.
The ID: Telegram stores the file on its unlimited infrastructure and returns a unique, permanent File ID.
Proxy & Serve: When someone requests https://your-vps.com/img/{id}, TgCloud fetches the raw data from Telegram's CDN and proxies it directly back to the user.

This makes it 100% hotlink-friendly and compatible with Discord, Slack, Markdown, or standard HTML <img> tags!

Features

Dual Upload: Supports local file upload (multipart/form-data) or remote URL cloning (application/json).
Instant Hotlinks: Generates direct, clean URLs that display images natively anywhere on the web.
Format Validation: Built-in protection that auto-rejects unsupported formats (supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP).
ShareX Integration: Comes with a custom .sxcu config so you can upload your desktop screenshots directly to your own server.

Quick Start (Deploy in 10 seconds)

TgCloud is compiled into a single pre-built binary, meaning you don't even need Go installed on your VPS to run it.

# 1. Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com.git
cd TgCloud

# 2. Create your environment file
echo "BOT_TOKEN=your_telegram_bot_token" > .env
echo "CHAT_ID=your_channel_id" >> .env
echo "PORT=8100" >> .env

# 3. Run it!
go mod tidy && go run main.go

Your public image hosting server is now live at http://localhost:8100!

⚠ Limitations to Keep in Mind

Since this project leverages a chat platform API, it is intended for personal, hobby, and educational use:

Rate Limits: Telegram limits Bot API traffic to roughly ~30 requests per minute.
File Size: Maximum of 20MB per image (enforced by the Telegram Bot API).
Bandwidth: Since the tool proxies the image data, it uses your VPS bandwidth to serve the files, not Telegram's.

Looking for Feedback!

As I mentioned, I am still learning Go, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the code structure, error handling, or performance improvements.

Any tips on optimizing Go reverse proxies for heavy image streaming?

Check out the code on GitHub and let me know what you think in the comments below! 🦀

Made with ❤ by AdrienMttn

DEV Community: adrien