ENGINEERING

A Telegram bot answered by your own gateway

August 2026 · 4 min read

Why Telegram + your own gateway

Telegram is where half the company already answers questions, so it is the cheapest place to put a private assistant. The bot below needs no webhook, no public URL and no framework: long-polling from any machine with outbound internet. Every message is answered by your gateway, on infrastructure you control, with the same per-key budget and audit log as every other tool in this series.

Step 1: Create the bot (2 minutes)

1. In Telegram, talk to @BotFather → /newbot → pick a name and a handle.
2. BotFather replies with the bot token, that is your TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN.

Step 2: The whole bot

import os, requests

TG = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{os.environ['TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN']}"
ISOL = "https://tokens.4clouders.com/v1/chat/completions"
KEY = os.environ["ISOL_API_KEY"]

def ask_isol(text: str) -> str:
    r = requests.post(ISOL, timeout=60,
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"},
        json={"model": "isol-4.9", "messages": [
            {"role": "system", "content": "You are the company's private assistant. Be brief."},
            {"role": "user", "content": text}]})
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]

def main():
    offset = None
    while True:
        upds = requests.get(f"{TG}/getUpdates",
            params={"timeout": 50, "offset": offset}, timeout=60).json()
        for u in upds.get("result", []):
            offset = u["update_id"] + 1
            msg = u.get("message") or {}
            if "text" in msg:
                requests.post(f"{TG}/sendMessage", json={
                    "chat_id": msg["chat"]["id"],
                    "text": ask_isol(msg["text"])})

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Step 3: Prove the brain works before wiring the token

The function every message goes through is ask_isol(), and you can run it before touching Telegram at all. This is it, executed live against our gateway:

Then: export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=…, python3 telegram_isol_bot.py, and message your bot.

Gotchas we hit running this for real

• Long-polling beats webhooks for a first deploy, no TLS certificate, no public URL, works from behind NAT. Move to webhooks only when volume demands it.
• One gateway key per bot. When the bot goes viral internally, its budget is its own, not your CI key's.
• Set timeout=60 on the model call, long answers on long context can pass 30s, and the default requests timeout is none (hang) not some (fail fast).

Handler executed against the live iSol gateway on 2026⁠-⁠08⁠-⁠19. Chat-side screenshots come from the deployment walkthrough, bring your BotFather token.

Try it on ours

Our gateway (iSol API) runs exactly this setup on sovereign infrastructure, US$ 99/month, 14-day trial.

See plans →