Build a Telegram Bot That Pings You Daily

What you’ll build: your own Telegram bot that sends you a message every day on a schedule — a motivational quote, a reminder to drink water, today’s weather, your daily standup prompt, whatever. Time: ~20 minutes. Cost: free.

The trick: Telegram makes bot creation genuinely easy, and a no-code automation tool handles the “send this every morning” part — so there’s no server to run and no code to write.

The tools

• Telegram’s BotFather — a bot for making bots. You message it and it hands you a new bot. (Built into Telegram; free.)
• Make — a visual automation tool. You drag boxes: “every day at 8am → send this Telegram message.” (Free tier is plenty here. Zapier works the same way if you prefer it.)

Build it

1. Create your bot with BotFather. In Telegram, search @BotFather, start a chat, and send /newbot. Give it a name and a username (must end in bot). BotFather replies with a bot token — a long secret string. Copy it and keep it private.

2. Find your chat ID. Your bot needs to know who to message. In Telegram, message @userinfobot (a real bot) and it replies with your numeric user ID — that’s your chat ID. Also send your new bot any message once (say “hi”) so it’s allowed to message you back.

3. Build the schedule in Make.

• Create a new scenario.
• Add a Schedule trigger → set it to run daily at your chosen time.
• Add a Telegram Bot → Send a Message action. Create a connection using the bot token from step 1, set the Chat ID from step 2, and type your message.

4. Make the message interesting (optional but fun). Instead of a fixed line, insert a module before the Telegram step:

• HTTP → Get a request to a free quotes API (e.g. a public “quote of the day” endpoint) and send that text, or
• A weather module / an Open-Meteo HTTP call for today’s forecast.

5. Turn it on. Run the scenario once to test (you’ll get a Telegram message instantly), then toggle it ON. That’s it — you’ll get your daily ping tomorrow morning.

Make it yours

• A standup nudge: “What are your 3 priorities today?” every weekday at 9am.
• Water/stretch reminders every few hours.
• A “this day in history” or word-of-the-day feed.
• Group bot: add the bot to a group chat and use the group’s chat ID so it pings your friends/team instead of just you.

Reality check

• The bot token is a password — anyone with it controls your bot. Don’t paste it in public.
• Free automation tiers cap how many runs you get per month; one daily message is nowhere near the limit.
• This setup is for scheduled, outgoing messages. A bot that replies to what you type is a bit more involved (it needs to listen for incoming messages) — doable in Make with a “watch updates” trigger, or graduate to a hosted script later.

Prefer building things you tap rather than type at? Turn a spreadsheet into a real phone app next.