Getting started

This walks the whole path — from a fresh bot token to a bot that's live and answering messages. It takes a few minutes.

1. Get a bot token from Telegram

Open @BotFather in Telegram, send /newbot, and follow the prompts to name your bot. BotFather replies with an API token that looks like 123456789:AA…. Keep it handy — you'll paste it into Gramflow once.

2. Connect the token

Sign in at app.gramflow.io and create a bot by pasting the token. Gramflow verifies it with Telegram and pulls in your bot's name and username. Your token is encrypted at rest — it's the whole bot, so it never leaves storage in plain text.

3. Build a flow on the canvas

Every bot starts from a trigger — usually Message Received or Command Received. Drag one onto the canvas, then wire it to the nodes that do the work:

Reply with Send Message, or ask a question and pause with a wait-for-input step.
Branch on what the user said with Condition or Switch.
Call an API with HTTP Request, or generate a reply with Generate Text.

Don't want to start from a blank canvas? Pick a template — it clones into a fully wired bot you can change and deploy. The node reference covers every node in detail.

4. Test before you ship

Every bot has two environments: TEST and LIVE. Build and try everything against TEST first — fire a real Telegram update at your draft and watch each node run, with a log of every step. Nothing reaches your real users until you deploy.

5. Deploy

When it's right, hit Deploy. Gramflow hosts and runs your bot on every incoming message — no VPS, no cloud account, nothing to babysit. Change the flow later and deploy again; the new version takes over instantly.

Browse the node reference to see what each node does, or check troubleshooting if something isn't behaving.