Telegram Moderation Bot Pricing Comparison 2026: What $X/Month Actually Buys (Combot, Rose, Shieldy, Varta, GroupHelp, Watchdog)

Most Telegram moderation bot landing pages show you a price. Few show you what the price actually unlocks. The difference between "$5/month" and "$29/month" stops being meaningful once you ask per group? Per member? Per AI check? With AI at all?

This post answers the question admins actually have when they sit down to compare: at my group size, with my admin team, in my languages — what's the cheapest configuration that actually protects my community?

Full disclosure: I built Varta, one of the six bots compared below. I'll point out where another bot is the right call before I get to where Varta is. The data is current as of May 2026 — pricing pages drift, double-check before committing.

The full pricing landscape, side by side

Two patterns jump out before you even read the cells. Per-group pricing (Combot, GroupHelp) means every additional group you protect adds to the bill. Total-network pricing (Varta, partly Watchdog) means you pay once for a member-cap that spans every group you run. The shape of your community decides which model is cheaper at your scale.

The other split: free tiers exist on five of six bots, but they cover very different scopes.

What "free" actually means per bot

Rose and Shieldy are genuinely free at all scales. They're also rule-based — you maintain everything (keyword lists for Rose, captcha-only protection for Shieldy). At small scale that's a reasonable trade. At growing scale the maintenance time isn't free anymore, just unbilled.

Combot and GroupHelp's free tiers cover basic moderation but route advanced features through paid plans. The paid plans are per-group, so the bill scales with your community count.

Varta's free tier is structurally different: it's the full AI engine, not a stripped-down version. The 5-day trial timer activates only when Varta catches your first spam in a given group. A community that never sees spam stays free indefinitely on Varta — same protection, no clock. That choice was deliberate; we'd rather the bot prove its value before any timer starts.

Watchdog's the outlier here: no permanent free tier. The trial is a runway to $29/month Starter; below that price point Watchdog isn't a fit.

Cost by group size — the honest math

Pricing tables in the abstract don't help much. What matters is the monthly bill at your scale, against your alternatives. Four scale buckets, same admin profile across each — here's the math:

Three patterns the math surfaces:

• Below 1K members in a single group: the free tier of any bot is your answer. Rose or Shieldy are the cheapest by a wide margin. AI moderation at this scale is overkill — a keyword list maintained by a single admin is fine.
• 1K–5K members across 1–3 groups: Varta Hobby ($5) or Combot Pro ($5/group) are the entry points. Varta's $5 covers full AI; Combot's $5 covers per-group rules without AI. Pick by whether you want to write rules or have the bot make calls.
• 5K+ members across multiple groups: Varta's flat-fee model wins on cost almost universally. At 10 groups, Varta Business is $99 vs Watchdog Enterprise $499 vs per-group bots at $30–50 with no AI. The cost difference compounds with each group added.

What you're actually paying for at each price point

Headline prices hide the feature picture. Here's a more honest read on what each tier of each bot actually delivers — focused on the dimensions that matter when you're managing a real community.

$0 / month — the free tier reality check

At $0, you're choosing between rule-based and AI-based moderation. Rose and Shieldy are rule-based and stay rule-based forever. Varta's free tier is AI-based; the 5-day clock starts only on first spam catch. Combot's and GroupHelp's free tiers are basic rule-based moderation with paid upgrades to richer rules — still no AI.

The trade-off at $0: rule-based bots scale linearly with your maintenance time. As your community grows, maintaining keyword lists across multiple groups eats more hours per week. AI moderation moves that work to the bot — at zero ongoing cost while you stay under the trial-trigger threshold.

$5–10 / month — the entry to AI

Varta Hobby at $5/month is the cheapest AI moderation tier on the market in 2026. At this price you get the same Claude/GPT/Gemini classifier running in 46 live communities, 33-language native reasoning, image and QR analysis, cross-group reputation. The $5 is a flat fee covering up to one small community.

Combot Pro at $5 per group covers analytics + rule-based moderation per group. Multiply by your group count for the real number.

GroupHelp Premium at ~$3 per group covers advanced rule features. Same multiplication.

$19–49 / month — the sweet spot for active communities

Varta Starter ($19) and Pro ($49) cover 5,000 and 25,000 members respectively, total across all your groups. At Pro tier, communities running Varta see roughly 30 spam attempts per day handled silently across the network, with the false-positive rate measured at 2.3% over the last 30 days. Cross-group reputation flags repeat offenders network-wide — 7 first-message catches in the last 30 days came from this signal alone.

Watchdog Pro at $99 sits at the same price point as Varta Business. Watchdog's strength is admin tooling — shared moderator dashboards, warning systems, bulk actions — wrapped around a rule-based engine. If your bottleneck is moderator-team coordination, Watchdog's polish is real. If your bottleneck is decision quality on every message, AI moderation does more work for the same dollar.

$99–499 / month — enterprise scale

At this price point, Varta Business covers up to 100,000 members across unlimited groups. Watchdog Enterprise at $499/month covers unlimited groups but is English-first and rule-based.

For multi-community networks (DAOs, multi-language brands, agency-managed communities), the practical question becomes whether you need the rich admin tooling of Watchdog Enterprise or the AI engine of Varta Business — or both, running side by side. Many crypto-launch communities run both: Watchdog for moderator workflow, Varta for message-level moderation. They don't conflict.

Multilingual coverage — a hidden cost line

Pricing pages don't usually mention this, but multilingual support is a real cost driver if your community isn't English-native.

Combot, Rose, Shieldy, Watchdog, and GroupHelp all rely on you maintaining keyword lists per language. If your group operates in Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, or Spanish — you'll need separate keyword sets per language, all maintained as spam patterns evolve. That's effort the price doesn't reflect.

Varta uses a frontier language model end-to-end. The same bot reasons in 33 languages without per-language configuration. In Varta's live network as of May 2026, 10 languages are actively in use — including Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Communities in any of these languages get the same accuracy as English-native ones, with no extra setup.

For Ukrainian-speaking communities specifically, this is the largest practical difference. Same for Russian-speaking diaspora communities. The keyword-list-per-language tax doesn't exist on the Varta side.

When another bot is the right call

I built Varta, but I'm not pretending it's the right answer for every admin. Two scenarios where another bot fits cleanly:

Single English-only group with no budget and simple needs. If you're running a 200-member hobby community, write a 30-word keyword list, install Rose or Shieldy, and you're done. AI moderation at this scale is solving a problem you don't have. Pick Rose if you want richer admin features (federations, locks, notes); pick Shieldy if you only need entry-captcha and don't care about message-level moderation.

Enterprise SaaS community with a 5+ moderator team that lives in the dashboard. If your bottleneck is moderator coordination — shared warning systems, appeal workflows, bulk actions across a moderator team — Watchdog's admin tooling is the most polished in the space, and the $99/month tier is reasonable for that workflow. If you don't need cross-language reasoning or cross-group reputation, Watchdog's package is solid.

For everyone else — multi-language communities, multi-group operators, solo admins, communities at growing scale, anyone whose primary spam shape is image-embedded URLs or impersonation — AI moderation does more work per dollar.

The 60-second decision tree

1. Is your community under 500 members in a single English-only group? → Rose Free or Shieldy Free.
2. Are you running 1–3 groups in 1–2 languages with moderate spam? → Varta Hobby ($5) or Combot Pro ($5/group). Pick Varta if you want AI; Combot if you want rules + analytics.
3. Are you running 5+ groups, or a community above 5K members, or a non-English-native community? → Varta Pro ($49) or Business ($99). The flat-fee model and 33-language coverage make this the cheapest configuration at scale.
4. Do you have a moderator team of 5+ humans whose workflow is the bottleneck? → Watchdog Pro ($99) for the admin tooling. Consider running Varta alongside for the message-level AI layer.
5. Are you a crypto launch community at high join velocity? → SafeguardBot at the gate + Varta for post-entry moderation. Detail here.

Test before you buy

Before you commit to any bot at any price point, the most useful 3 minutes you'll spend is in the live classifier. Paste a real spam message into the Varta demo — same AI that runs in production across 46 communities. The verdict comes back in 3 seconds with plain-language reasoning. If that judgment matches yours on a representative sample, the rest of the migration is easy.

Pricing pages don't tell you whether the bot's judgment matches yours. The demo does.

Pricing data verified May 2026 from public pricing pages. Varta is free to add — the 5-day AI trial starts only when I catch your first spam. Add Varta in shadow mode →