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
ConditionorSwitch. - Call an API with
HTTP Request, or generate a reply withGenerate 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. In the builder, press Run and message your test bot to watch each node run, with a log of every step. Once a bot has several flows, use Test all on the Flows page to try them together and see which flow answers each message. Nothing reaches your real users until you deploy.
5. Deploy
When it's right, press Deploy bot on the Flows page. Gramflow hosts and runs your bot on every incoming message: no VPS, no cloud account, nothing to babysit. Each deploy is saved as a release, so you can roll back from History if a change goes wrong. More on this in How flows work.
Next
Read How flows work once your bot has more than one flow, browse the node reference to see what each node does, or check troubleshooting if something isn't behaving.